Yes, it was evil. If only because I stood in dark doorways. For as everyone should know, a doorway is the favorite dwelling place of evil.
Saul became Paul. (skip) but I screamed silently, screamed as perhaps a star screams of a fish deep down in the sea. I screamed first into the frosty night that new snow might fall at last, and then into the glass, the dense glass, the precious glass, the cheap glass, the transparent glass, the partitioning glass, the glass between worlds, the virginal, mystical glass that separated Jan Bronski from the ruby necklace, cutting a hole just right for Jan's glove size, which was well known to me. I mad the cutout fall inward like a trap door, like the gate of heaven or the gate of hell:
(skip)
and found me, Oskar, in the doorway.
revealing an abyss of emptiness which apparently nothing could fill but enormous quantities of fried, boiled, preserved, and smoked fish.
He wished to go down into the pit with Mama and the fetus. And there he wished to remain while the survivors tossed in their handfuls of earth, no, Oskar didn't wish to come up, he wished to sit on the tapering foot end of the coffin, drumming if possible, drumming under the earth, until the sticks rotted out of his hands, until his mama for his sake and he for her sake should rot away, giving their flesh to the earth and its inhabitants; with his very knuckles Oskar would have wished to drum for the fetus, if it had only been possible and allowed.
while Oskar cried from hate and love, which turned to a leaden helplessness but could not die.
Everything about Greff was overdone.
Though I had not forgotten them, I missed none of them.
Against all my better judgement, despite my ingrained skepticism, I wanted happiness.
As soon as the Onion Cellar had filled up - half-full was regarded as full - Schmuh, the host, donned his shawl. (skip)
The customers - businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, theater and movie people, well-known figures from the sporting world, officials in the provincial and municipal government, in short, a cross section of the world which nowadays calls itself intellectual - came with wives, mistresses, secretaries, interior decorators, and occasional male mistresses, to sit on crates covered with burlap. Until Schmuh put on his golden-yellow onions, the conversation subdued, forced, dispirited. These people wanted to talk, to unburden themselves, but they couldn't seem to get started; despite all their efforts, they left the essential unsaid, talked around it. Yet how eager they were to spill their guts, to talk from their hearts, their bowels, their entrails, to forget about their brains just this once, to lay bare the raw, unvarnished truth, the man within. (skip)
The Onion Cellar had its specialty: onions. And moreover, the onion, the cut onion, when you look at it closely. . . but enough of that, Schmuh's guests had stopped looking, they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were so full; for it is not true that when the heart is full the eyes necessarily overflow, some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century. (skip) what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It mad them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. (skip)
After this cataclysm at twelve marks eighty, human beings who have had a good cry open their mouths to speak. Still hesitant, startled by their nakedness of their own words, the weepers poured out their hearts to their neighbors on the uncomfortable, burlap-covered crates, submitted to questioning, let themselves to turned inside-out like overcoats.
my poor mama, the foolish and lovable Jan Bronski, and Matzerath, the cook who knew how to transform feelings into soups? All of them needed to be wept for.
- 대학시절 그저 난잡한 책이라고 만 느껴졌던 때와는 다르게 작년 11월부터 읽기 시작해 중간중간 책의 무게가 너무 무거워 쉬어가며 읽은 책. 자라지 못하는 몸을 가진 오스카의 말로 형언해내기 어려운 생각과 그의 행동 속에 표현되지지 못한 우리자신의, 사회의, 시대의 추한 모습을 보는 듯하여 소름이 돋았다. 유리를 깨는 그의 목청과 미친듯한 드럼의 소리로 시대에 무기력한 인간의 절규를 표현해 낸 듯 하다. 그의 obscene한 생각과 행동들이 무척이나 쓸쓸하고 슬픈 것은 Gunter Grass의 천재적인 표현에 의해서만 가능한 듯.
