Uncomfortable truths

In the delicate but halting detail of a septuagenarian who is summoning the fragments of memory, this memoir chronicles the author's circuitous path via wartime Europe to becoming a writer. "Peeling the Onion" is more than the stories of a soldier -- it is a beautiful account of the ebbings of deprivations and the flowing of relief, both physical and metaphysical. Grass explains himself in terms of "three hungers," which are the driving forces of this narrative and his life: "The ordinary hunger everyone knows could be alleviated for hours by turnip soup with a few sparse globules of fat or even by frost-damaged potatoes, and the desire for carnal love, that panting, unbidden, unyielding onslaught of self-renewing lust, could be deadened by a chance encounter or a few flicks of the wrist. My hunger for art, however, the need to make an image for myself of everything standing still or in motion ... was insatiable."

Grass lusted, starved, escaped death, witnessed horrors, was wounded and imprisoned. Eventually, he set himself adrift in the direction of art. His postwar wanderings sent him to work in a potash mine, as a stone mason, and then to art school, where he studied sculpture. And the poems that he wrote throughout those years were the nourishment for what he calls his "third hunger."

But, in his words, "Like hunger, guilt and the shame that follows gnaw away at you, all the time. My hunger was only periodic, but my shame.... " Grass doesn't finish this sentence. His memoir dips in and out of his acknowledgments of contrition, just as his text gets close to and removes itself from his younger self. "I was silent," he writes. "Because so many others have kept silent, the temptation is great ... to shift the blame onto the collective guilt, or to talk about oneself only figuratively in the third person: He was, saw, did, said, he kept silent."

Indeed, many moments in "Peeling the Onion" shift from "I" to "he" -- moments in which Grass perhaps isn't sure what that boy was thinking, when he can't "make" his younger self speak. So Grass consults "the onion" to clear the fog that enters his view of the past:

"When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter.... Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that, once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself."