Ahh, Oskar

In the US the United flights all have WiFi.  Air China doesn’t.  They probably wont for a while.  I flew Cathay the other day and Hong Kong’s finest didn’t allow me to get on line either.  Surely though, these are with waning days of all this.  Some highly secure, perhaps notably restricted form of connectivity will invariably round out  “Fish with rice or chicken with noodles?” options in the skies over the Middle Kingdom before too long. 

And it will be a shame.  Because at present it offers all the excuse one needs to read a book for the flight, rather than do emails. I flew home from Hong Kong to Beijing yesterday and finished off the last two hundred pages of “The Tin Drum.”  Ahh, Oskar.  It isn’t easy to check in with Oskar for discrete little bursts  Best to stay with him and finish the ark of the war and then, to my surprise the third book’s chronicling of his reluctant role as a drummer in Egon Münzer’s jazz band, thereafter.  Perhaps this is what reading “Ulysses” in a foreign language is like: you proceed ahead cautiously tapping the ground with your cane, like the blind man who criss-crosses Dublin’s streets, missing all the alliteration, puns and word play but content that you can generally trace the narrative. 

I had only just reached Oskar’s summary trial when my plane landed.  A few more pages in the line for immigration. Four more on the shuttle train to luggage.  Out from customs and got my coffee and sat down to make my way through Gottfried Vittlar’s indictment at the ring finger trial.  People walked back and forth before my Starbucks stool.  Could one of them be the Black Cook, chasing Oskar?  Everyone could be. 

My wife rang and asked where the hell I was.  “Oh, well you see, the plane took off late and what with luggage and all . . .” It’s nearly 4:00PM.”  “Is it?  Oh.  Well I’ve just finished off the most remarkable novel, you see and . . .” Not well received. 

This evening though I found a place to watch the 1979 Volker Schlondorff film "The Tin Drum" on line.  I can remember the adds for it and Oskar’s troubling face from back at that time. I got my kids to join on Oskar’s troubling journey.  The older one jumped ship after the first two hours but the younger one made it through.  It wasn’t long before we discovered why it had been banned in Oklahoma back in the day, but with a bit of judicious forwarding it was remarkable to watch the film, feeling as though I at least, had earned the right to consider the film having read the literature.  And Grass' novel wasn’t one either of these girls were going to curl up with and read any time soon.  Volker through only took on Book One and Two of the three book novel.  The refugee Germans board the train to leave Danzig for the Rhineland at the end of the film and it rides off in the distance as the credits role.  The reader would know that this train ride won’t go well.  As good a time as any for a reminder about refugees in our world.  This was a world Angela Merkel would have heard a thing or two about growing up.

I just looked and it doesn’t appear that anyone has ever bothered to make Book Three into a movie.  That’s when Oskar finally decides to grow.  It seems to me a shame.  Perhaps I’m just a product of contemporary Hollywood where there is always budget to turn, say The Hobbit, into three successive movies.  The Swiss actor who played Oskar, David Bennet, who appears to be the same tender age as your author, still walks the earth.  Presumably he’s thought of this before.  Might he be available?



Saturday, 4/08/17