The Living Statue

At the end of the 1980s, a writer on a book tour, who very much resembles Grass, passes through East Germany and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor's models to dinner-and they come, not as ghosts, but as they were when alive in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: a living statue.

As he continues touring around Europe, the writer looks for Uta and her donation basket outside every cathedral he passes. At last, in Frankfurt, he sees her in front of Deutsche Bank and the two have a meeting with staggering consequences. As Grass said, "on paper everything is possible," and in this tale he gleefully erases the line between life and death, present and past.

Delightfully strange... There's a pleasingly timeless quality to this time capsule from a master.-- "Publishers Weekly" Exquisite writing.--Charles Simic "The New York Review of Books" I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. Among the immortals.--Salman Rushdie "The New Yorker" The strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in Germany since 1945. Much of what is active in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls lies in this man's ribald keeping.-- "Commentary"

Günter Grass (1927–2015), Germany’s most celebrated contemporary writer, attained worldwide renown with the publication of his novel The Tin Drum in 1959. A man of remarkable versatility, Grass was a poet, playwright, social critic, graphic artist, and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions.

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