The Tin Drum

The haunting and serious voice of Fred Williams matches well this haunting story of a German boy who refuses to grow up. Williams reads with a slight Gerrman accent, which matches this work, considered by many to be greatest post-WWII German novel, written by a Nobel laureate in literature. Written in 1959, the story presents the world of Nazi Germany from the perspective of Oskar Matzerath and follows his experiences before and during the Second World War. Not surprisingly, the overriding theme of this dark comedy is the madness of violence and war. M.L.C. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Can a first-person narrator like Oskar Matzerath, who is confined to psychiatric hospital, be considered reliable? Did the events he recounts really happen to him? Did the characters he describes really live? We can be sure that Oskar lived through WWII in Danzig and later went to DŸsseldorf, but not much else. Breon Mitchell's new translation of THE TIN DRUM shows it to be the masterpiece it is, and Paul Michael Garcia's performance--sometimes melodramatic, sometimes at (or over) the edge of hysteria--serves it well. Some of the voices don't stand out as individuals, but this is so thoroughly Oskar's story book that Garcia could very well have made that choice deliberately. Together, Garcia, Grass, and Mitchell take listeners on a tour of love, war, and madness. D.M.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Comic horror of the highest order, Nobelist Grass's first novel and first masterpiece was made into an Oscar-winning film and now appears as an equally meritorious audiobook. It is the sardonic reminiscence of Oskar, an institutionalized midget whose tin drum and piercing scream of protest can shake mountains. Narrator Guidall has outdone himself with this title. It isn't that he has obviously studied the book thoroughly before entering the studio--he always does his homework--nor that he has hit the right tone and has cleverly made his voice sound small--nor even that he gets all the sly, obscure (for Americans) social and political jokes about Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. It's all those things--plus he has astutely picked up the thematic threads and images and manifested them without clubbing the listener over the head with them. The palpable richness of Guidall's delivery is immensely entertaining. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine