Gunter Grass

When novelists of dignity and repute take brief journeys to countries other than their own, and shortly thereafter produce works that span the genres of travelogues and political commentaries, the results are rarely as distinguished as is Gunter Grass' extraordinary account of his sojourn in Calcutta. To readers disappointed by the hasty authority of such texts as V. S.

Rats take over the world in the posthuman era after Doomsday, in this tragicomic, dizzyingly inventive novel that's as intricate as the inner workings of a baroque clock. The protagonist is a man who asks for, and receives, a Christmas rat under the tree as a present. "She plays with my fears, she can feel them. So I talk in self-defense." Soon, the She-rat emerges in his imagination and dreams. She tells him about the historical experiences of rats.

"He would suddenly be playing soccer with a soft hadrak under the blooming cherry trees of his hometown. . . . Or chewing his dinner, he would dream that he was trying to pawn the violin expropriated from La Belle Epoque to his old music teacher, who now appraised large radios at Cash in a Flash downtown, while outside, Russian tanks, looking like miserable little electric shavers in the vast scale of the skyscraper canyon, rolled through skid row."