The author of The Tin Drum is back in Danzig with The Call of the Toad, a poignant, irreverent, funny novel about two people who find adventure in love and business. The love is late middle-aged; the business is the cemetery business. The couple's vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. He, the German, will provide not only the bodies but cash and know-how; she, the Pole, will provide the human warmth and political fervor. Gunter Grass tells a tale of capitalism taken to absurd extremes as he skewers both the German and the Polish characters, past, present, and future - with the style, tenderness, and baroque inventiveness that have made him famous.
