"The Flounder" is one of those monstrous miscellanies like Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Melville's "Moby Dick" (a Grass favorite), Flaubert's "Bouvard and Pecuchet," and (in our century) Joyce's "Ulysses," that can take on the guise of narrative fictions but whose wilder energies lie elsewhere—as inflatable vessels of bizarre information, vehicles for all kinds of encyclopedic, mythological, and historical lore….

Frequently these are scabrous and scandalous books, more blatantly obscene than other kinds of fiction—Mr. Grass is no exception here—yet they're also the work of intensely bookish men, anal types, collectors and compilers, shy but lecherous antiquarians. One of the things they collect is words, language; they have a passion for lists as well as facts, for epic catalogues and literary parodies. Where many novelists use language as a transparent medium for picturing the familiar world, these novels are...