Book of the Century?

NEARLY FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, a period that Grass mostly spent working assiduously on his new novel, Der Butt appeared in August 1977. Its publication was preceded by extraordinarily intense media interest, which was in part fuelled by critics' expectations that after Tagebuch, which had been less than enthusiastically received (see ch. 6), Grass would redeem himself by presenting a “genuine” novel in the manner of Die Blechtrommel: that is, without straying too far into the realm of contemporaneous politics. In addition, the reading public's curiosity about Der Butt was aroused by a skillful advertising campaign on the part of Grass's publisher Luchterhand — a campaign that included the mailing of four thousand advance copies to various recipients. Although some observers deemed this an excessively large number, others note that Luchterhand's marketing strategy cannot be considered unwarranted in view of a huge first printing of a hundred thousand copies (Durzak 1982, 70). The author himself contributed significantly to the marketing effort; during the last eight weeks before the official publication date he gave thirty readings from the novel, and in the eighteen months preceding this intensive reading effort, Grass had come face to face with more than ten thousand potential readers via his presentations (H. L. Arnold 1997, 135).