The Box: Tales from the Darkroom - Günter Grass

Category: History, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Memories Unreliable Narrators

Written by Günter Grass
Read by Stefan Rudnicki
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

In a great literary experiment, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, and of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory—they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men, a shadowy but loving figure. There is one constant though: Marie, a family friend and photographer whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with inspiration for his novels. But her images offer much more; they reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, and grant the wishes, in visual form, of those photographed. Marie’s camera thus becomes a way for Grass to speak in the voices of his children’s hidden selves—their dreams, their disappointments, their secret desires and fears—and to see his own life from unexpected perspectives.

The second part of Günter’s “Memoir” Trilogy (of which the finale, Grimms’ Words: A Declaration of Love, was never published in English).

Audio Release Date:
November 18 2010

4 hrs and 54 mins