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The Rat by Günter Gross

Diversity win! The rodent psychically tormenting the last man alive is a woman!

Happy Rattober, everybody. I am posting some Rattober stuff on my art blog. I aim to draw every day, though I might not post every day and instead do some round-ups at the end of a week.

Anyway. Today’s book to review is the novel The Rat, written in 1986 by Günter Grass and translated by Ralph Mannheim. This might be my first translated rat book!

As a heads up, this review will touch on the Holocaust and themes related to treating people as vermin.

As another caveat, I read this book in 2022, more than 3 years ago. I have notes from the time when I read it, but I’d probably have different takeaways if I read it now. But I am not about to reread this book. It’s a big, hundreds-of-pages-long piece of literature with nested stories and sequences that may or may not be dreams.

So, yeah, this book is about… um… I’m trailing off already. One thing that this book is about is the author, being in a spaceship and witnessing the end of the world. He has a she-rat (the original title is Die Rättin, “The Rattess”) and she’s arguing with him in his head.

There’s rats building their own society, complete with religious schisms, after humans die off from nuclear bombs; there’s an old woman’s funeral and a lot of Smurfs; there’s fairy tale characters taking over the government; there’s the Pied Piper and a bunch of children and their Aryan rat-man offspring; there’s references to other works by Grass (sorry bro I haven’t read The Tin Drum); there’s five women researching jellyfish on this quest, who are kind of reminiscent of Annihilation come to think of it?; there’s German history and this one painting forger; there’s poetry that I didn’t really follow (but I’m sure Ralph Mannheim did his best); there’s debates about which dream is the real dream or if it’s all just a hallucination, and if it is, whose hallucination is it…

It’s a thick novel! This is probably the highest-reading-level book that I have reviewed. If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing that you will like. The nested narratives twist around and show up in each other in different ways. A book club could help, with the whole story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story part.

All this said, I did like it. It really gets into the thing that kicked off my rat obsession in the first place, so many years ago— how rats are a mirror to humanity. The book really looks into what “civilization” is, what human nature is, and what it means to be vermin. There are also stories about stories. (I promise the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents review is forthcoming!) It has funny parts, and sad parts, and things that will make you angry, or scared, or happy. It covers a lot of themes and a lot of emotional ground.

I said this about The Coming of the Rats, as well— I find a weird solace in old books about nuclear weapons. It’s a cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless, to know that decades ago people also worried that the world would end. And it didn’t!

Let’s talk about the German context. Some parts of it I missed, like placenames. But this book does explicitly mention the Holocaust and how Jewish people were treated as vermin. (I’m not sure if I’ll ever do a Maus review, but, yeah, similar theme.) Grass mentions being a Hitler Cub or something like that, which was startling. But what else could I expect from a German guy born in 1927? Humans are so complicated.

I wrote in my notes that it felt like panning for gold. Sometimes I could understand the book and enjoyed it, and other times I got nothing from it. There’s a reason I normally stick to children’s books.

Rats, huh? My rat obsession really kicked in during COVID lockdowns. Year of the Rat, plague overtaking the world, that sort of thing. Today, I feel like I’m a unique kind of rat loving sicko. I can enjoy the history of plague and rat-hunting, and also love the most wholesome smol fancy rats. They have high highs, and low lows. Sometimes rats are a symbol of filth, disgust, and entropy itself. But the exact same species can just as easily be the cutest thing on the face of the Earth. Or just a funny little guy from a meme. You could say the different facets detract from each other, but I think they actually enhance one another. Like humans, these different things are all true at once.

I’ll say it again— if this is the sort of thing you like, then you will like this thing. My overall rating was 3.5, and my personal rating was 3.

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