The Rat

Gunter Grass. Mariner Books, $17 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-15-675830-7

``A melange of fable, history, polemic, diatribe and jeremiad, its prose interspersed with verse, The Rat . . . defies brief description and amply displays Grass's fecund imagination,'' stated PW . The flounder and the tin drummer of previous works reappear and ``Manheim's heroic translation lucidly conveys Grass's linguistic idiosyncrasies, bizarre neologisms and madcap eccentricities.'' (May)

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