[In The Meeting at Telgte,] Günter Grass has taken the story of a group of writers who set about the task of seeing sharply, but with a sense of humor, and projected it 300 years backwards in time; which of course, Grass being Grass, enables him to tell the tale more humorously….

[We] have been given a marvellously credible portrait of a bunch of bitching, pedantic, devout, bawdy, gloomy and innocent men struggling to build a new world from the flawed fabric of their minds.

At the centre of the book stands Christoffel Gelnhausen, a version of the writer Grimmelshausen, whose novel Simplicissimus is the rumbustious, iconoclastic ancestor of The Tin Drum; riotous, self-taught, amoral, Stoffel is also Grass himself in green doublet and feathered hat. In The Flounder, Grass gave himself the starring role and popped up, disguised as all sorts of folk, throughout German history; in...