Local Anaesthetic: A Masterful Literary Novel Where Past and Present Collide

by Günter Grass, Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Starusch, a 40-year-old teacher of German and history, undergoes protracted dental treatment in an office where TV is used to distract the patients. Under local anesthesia, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. A satirical portrait of social confusions. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Genres: Fiction, Germany, German Literature, Novels, Literature, Nobel Prize, Classics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Novels, notably The Tin Drum (1959) and Dog Years (1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.

This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.

He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”

Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.

In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).

During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.

Reviews

[sAmAnE · Rating 3 out of 5]

بی‌حسی موضعی به نظرم یک روایت عجیب و خلاق از معلم تاریخی است که درگیر کار دندان‌پزشکی است و باید برای ترمیم دندان‌هایش به دندان پزشکش مراجعه کند. او راوی یکی از اعتراضات به حضور نظامی و دخالت‌های آمریکا در جنگ ویتنام است و زمانی که دندان پزشک دندان‌های او را ترمیم می‌کند به بررسی مسائل سیاسی و اجتماعی جامعه‌ی آلمان می‌پردازد.

برای من از کتاب طبل حلبی خیلی سخت‌خوان‌تر بود و اینکه کلا ادبیات آلمان برام خیلی جذاب نیست.

[AiK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ортодонтия и стоматология, геология, цемент, пемза – может это кому-то интересно… Продираться через поток сознания очень сложно. Грассово психосоматическое диагностическое определение, что зубные камни – это окаменевшая ненависть, запутанные мысли, постоянная оглядка назад, вечное желание посчитаться, когда все взаимно засчитывается, а склонность к оседающим десен карманов – это картина психики, угнездившаяся жестокость, задатки убийцы заставляет задуматься и может даже испугаться. Они (зубные камни) есть у очень многих, если не сказать, что почти у всех. Надеюсь, что Грасс в этом ошибается. Его Эбергард Штаруш – как он сам себя называет «невестоубийца», убийца Линды и убийца ее ребенка и ранивший ее мать из какого-то психопатического припадка, только из-за того, что он хочет спать, а ребенок визжит. Сложно понять. Я думаю, что поток сознания хорош в виде эксперимента, у первопроходцев Джойса, Вулф или у Фолкнера. Когда он начинает тиражироваться, это уже не ново, не вызывает изумления и восторга от правильного разгадывания. А только создает сложности в восприятии. Мне многое так и осталось непонятным. Как убив невесту и ребенка, он остается на свободе и учительствует? Зачем в книге столько жестокости, например, зачем было сжигать ни в чем не повинную собаку? Понятно, что его учеником двигала благородная цель – привлечь внимание общественности к использованию напалма во Вьетнаме, которым сжигали людей. Я не знаю, было ли это вправду или это художественный вымысел, и помогло ли это запретить напалм. В книге много актуальных идей, такие как критика общества потребления или нравственной важности даже безуспешного протеста (правда, я считаю, что форма протеста тоже важна – ни в коем случае не путем насилия или жестокости). Восхищает эрудиция Грасса, в частности аллюзия на жанровую картину Адриана Брауэра о цирюльнике, что впрочем объясняется его художественным образованием и то, как в старину вырывали, вернее выламывали зуб четверо в клинике Шарите. Но все-таки книга на любителя.

[Sophie K · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book has garnered quite a few unfavorable reviews on this site (and probably others), which i believe is due to the fact that it does not even to pretend to be approachable. this book does not coddle you with the traditional methods of character development. the action unfolds between injections of anaesthesia, projected onto a television screen, sometimes with programming, which can at times complement, compete with, and other times become entirely supplanted by, the author's internal cinema (sometimes a fiction, and sometimes biographical). other action unfolds in real time.

i at first found the book difficult to acclimate to because of the uniquely choppy (cubist-surrealist) tone and style of the book. in the beginning, the constant shifts between the author's projected cinema, and a very foreign, very german reality, can be trying on the western reader's ability to orient within the work. despite its brilliant, though challenging style, and its abstract criticisms of leftist humanitarianism, and of the naive hope ("anaesthetic") of utopian ideologists, i am much enamored with this philosophically dark work.

key scenes are revealed within rich, brilliantly colorful explosions of action, dialogue, internal struggle, fantasy, nightmare. characters are created, developed, denounced as non-existing, murdered, resurrected, murdered again. the setting, ranging between nazi germany and the vietnam war era from the german perspective, serves as a still-relevant backdrop, most of it taking place during a protracted dental procedure. the dentist serves as a sly antagonist, politically, and philosophically, to Ol' Hardy, our inept, quadragenarian anti-hero. engaging and stimulating quotations from nietzsche, seneca, and marx/engles, pepper the book while emphasizing, or nullifying, each opponents' objectives.

again, many of the reviewers mention not being able to complete the book. if you stick with it, you will be amply rewarded.

[Kalkwiese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grass liebt seine Döblin-ismen, wie ich sie mittlerweile nenne. (Vielleicht sollte ich da mal Döblin lesen, wenn ich schon so plappere ... Vielleicht, wenn ich mit Grass Gesamtwerk durch bin.)
Jedenfalls lässt Grass einen hier in der ersten Hälfte in einen Irrgarten aus Fantasien und Fiktionen des Protagonisten, aber auch Werbespots und Fernsehprogrammen rennen, die der Protagonist während seiner Zahnbehandlung auf einen Fernseher projiziert. Was wirr und undurchsichtig beginnt, gibt bald den Blick auf die eigentliche Handlung frei: Der Protagonist wird von einem seiner Schüler besucht, der ihm erklärt, dass er aus Protest öffentlich seinen Hund verbrennen will. (60er, Studentenbewegung, Vietnam-Krieg.)
Der Lehrer, der sich als Jugendbandenführer Störtebeker herausstellt, den man schon aus der Blechtrommel und den Hundejahren kennt, will seinen Schüler von der Tat abbringen und rät ihm zur Mäßigung.
Das ist im Prinzip auch der ganze Plot. Sehr viele Dialoge gibt es, wobei Grass den Leuten manchmal sehr grass'sche Worte in den Mund legt, die kein Mensch sonst so kombinieren würde. Beispiel: "Ersparen wir uns jetzt schon vorschmeckende Melancholie." Da spricht der Lyriker Grass, nicht die Lehrerin Irmgard Seifert. Da kannste mir sonst was erzählen, Günter! :P
Jedenfalls typisch Grass. Einerseits faszinierend und wortstark, andererseits leicht anstrengend, manchmal ärgerlich bürokratisch.
Trotzdem eines seiner besseren Bücher.

[Jino · Rating 3 out of 5]

باید در سطح جهان برای خشونت طلبی نسخه ی بیهوشی پیچید، یا به زبان عامیاته به خشونت طلبی بی حسی موضعی داد

[Zohreh Samiei · Rating 4 out of 5]

گيج می زنم در جریان خوانش این اثر؛ خوش خوان و آسان خوان نبود اما برایم نکته های جذاب و خواندنی کم نداشت!
کلید هایی که بی قفل می مانند و قفل هایی که بدون کلید بسر می برند!

[Radu Popovici · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*

[Talieh]

کتاب متن خیلی آشفته ای داره اما واقعا تجربه ی هیجان انگیزیه. به جای این که داستان رو به عنوان یه فرد بیرونی بشنویم، انگار رفتیم توی سر شخصیت اول داستان و داریم تصویرایی که تو ذهنش میاد رو با خودش تجربه می کنیم.
از طرفی شیوه ی روایت خیلی سمبلیکه و انگار در سطح زیرین داستان یه سری حرفای دیگه ای به صورت موازی با سطح آشفته ی داستان داره زده میشه...
و روند داستان جوریه که انگار میخواد بی حسی موضعی دندون های شخصیت اول داستان رو به مغز خواننده هاش سرایت بده... تاثیر خیلی عجیبی روم میذاره از این جهت...

----------------------

"As the book progresses, "facts" are exposed as fantasies, and these fantasies, once recognized, give a new inflection to still other facts and fantasies. As in music, every part modulates every other part. Grass even gives a new dimension to the old stream of consciousness device. He uses it not in the Impressionistic broken phrases of "Ulysses," but in Cubist chunks, in a constant, nagging re-examination of reality. The movement cuts, fades, zooms, pans from place to place, character to character. Grass even splits the screen to show separate scenes occurring simultaneously."
ANATOLE BROYARD-NEWYORK TIMES

[Dmitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep re-reading this book and get more from it each time. Easy to read, almost impossible to fully absorb.

[Sogol torabi · Rating 2 out of 5]

نمی‌دونم چطوری تونستم تا آخر ادامه بدم. این کتاب یک آشفته بازار به تمام معناست و برای کسی مثل من که همه چی رو تو ذهنش طبقه‌بندی و دسته‌بندی می‌کنه، واقعا به جای دوای روح، سم روح بود. همچین اینکه کل کتاب شخصیت اصلی زیر دست یک دندان‌پزشک بود که واقعا برای من آزاردهنده بود.
من کتاب طبل حلبی رو خوندم و عاشقش شدم و بعد این کتاب رو خریدم ولی سبک نوشتاری خیلی متفاوت بود.

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Günter Grass’s Local Anaesthetic has been on my night table and on my desk and in my luggage and slipping out of my hands for about a month now. It is finally finished. Don’t hold that lag time against it. Grass’s narrator—a 40-something West Berlin high-school teacher who spends half the book in a dentist’s chair, where a “tooth plumber” shoots him full of numbing drugs and scrapes calcified scum from the backside of his smile—spins an alternately hallucinogenic, veiled, misdirecting and foully candid stream of conflicted consciousness. Such talk befits an intelligent, virile male who came into manhood at the peak of the Nazi rise and crumble. The rinsing-and-spitting pedagogue introduces characters, story lines and themes with false randomness. This reticent and roundabout mode of revelation may contribute to slow sledding for a reader such as me, but seems about right coming from a professed mentor who’s trying to dovetail his fatherland’s recent militaristic abominations with the present day (1969) conception of global morality. An alert reader’s appreciation of Local Anaesthetic will be unspoiled by learning beforehand that the book concludes with two mutually contradictory, individually irrefutable sentences: “Nothing lasts. There will always be pain.”

[Sharare Ranjbar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't get it!!

[Payam Hamzei · Rating 2 out of 5]

داستان یک معلم تاریخ که به دندان‌پزشک مراجعه می‌کند و در حالی که روی صندلی دندان‌پزشکی نشسته و تلویزیونی جلوی او قرار دارد تا حواسش را از عملیات دردآور ترمیم دندان، منحرف کند، داستان و گفتگوهای واقعی و خیالی خود را از کودکی تا زمان حال برای بیننده تعریف می‌کند. در این بین شرایط جامعه آلمان بعد از جنگ را هم روایت می‌کند. کتاب سختی بود.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read most of this book in the bath.

[Adabelle Xie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in a stream of consciousness style where flashbacks blend with philosophical musings blend with daydreams of could-have-beens and T.V. advertisements. It’s pretty difficult to follow up to page 100 but gets less incoherent as it goes on. Lively, thought-provoking, and worth its short stay. Full review here

[مهدیار دلکش · Rating 1 out of 5]

مدت‌ها بود که کتابی به این بدی نخونده بودم

[Nick Kozel]

This book was actual hell to get through. Reading comprehension be damned! Grab the dog ears with your fists and make it obey!

[carl theaker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in '69 the story takes place in the 50-60s. A hippie teacher mentors a
like-minded student while dealing with a former fanatical Field Marshal
fiancee-in-law who has returned from being a POW in Russia. Feels dated in
its dealings with the issues of the era. Also tries too hard to be artsy
with the story told through visits to the dentist.

WWII buffs might find it interesting that the Field Marshal probably
depicts Ferdinand Schoerner who was known for getting the job
done on the Russian front, but was also despised by his officers
and men since he at times had them shot without much regard.
After he returned from being a prisoner in Russia, even the Germans
locked him up for that for a few years.

This is also covered in Siegfried Knappe's memoir as he served under
Schoerner for a time.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There appeared to be a fucund period where I couldn't stop reading Gunter grass. This time is highlighted in my memory but eternal sunshine and febrile trips to Bloomington. I finished thsi one sitting in the Highlands, amazed at teh disocurse, the counterarguments, the sage handle on it all. What was truly breathtaking that the book was so germane 25 years after its publication.

[dead letter office · Rating 1 out of 5]

i will evidently not be getting a nobel prize for literature appreciation

[Karolina I-ska · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually 3 and a half, but there's no such rating.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be quite honest, although I remember reading this 30 years ago, I don't recall it well enough to make a reliable rating!

[Nikolay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bridging the awkward gap between information and informationology (a constant state of information), the old writer Grass makes an example out of himself to the Nihilists (Camus or Handke) by discoursing about the plot of burning a live dog for pages upon pages, with an intermission for an errant sexual escapade, nothing is as it seems because nothing seems likely but still nothing is abhorrently horrible and so we concede to listen to the diatribe losing nothing of the story of war criminals and the torture that begets political change while searching for the answer in a crooked jaw and bleeding gums.

I would like to imagine Grass making a brazenly awkward visit to several dentists confirming the validity of one another's claims about the science of dentistry and orthodontics, imploring that such facts will fit tidily into his new novel and trying to explain in between teeth cleaning sessions exactly what metaphorically apt condition his narrator suffers from all the while imagining that he's telling his dentist stories of the days gone by.

The structure of this novel is certainly cluttered (like an impacted tooth) but that's no skin off Grass's lip who's branded the style for its effectiveness in simulating the combinations-correlations of every day life, the little connections that we often forget about in the grand scheme of things but Grass uses to illustrate the complicated nature of man's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. I like in particular this novel's tendency to erase characters' contributions to the story in favor of what the new b best plot line offers, a mark of dynamic writing that lends thought to the dynamism of the human mind which often erases history even in the state of informationology in which we often live.

[Socrate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toate astea i le-am povestit dentistului meu. Cu gura amorţită şi aşezat în faţa ecranului mat care, tot atît de lipsit de glas ca şi mine, debita publicitate: spray pentru păr Wustenrot. Mai alb decît albul cel mai imaculat... Vai, şi din congelatorul unde, alături de lapte şi
rinichi de viţel, era depusă şi logodnica mea, se lansau către suprafaţă băşici vorbitoare ca în benzile desenate: „Nu-i lăsa să te vîre aici. Nu-i lăsa să te vîre aici..."

(Sfîntă Apollonia, roagă-te pentru mine!) Elevelor şi elevilor mei le-am spus: „încercaţi să fiţi îngăduitori. Sînt nevoit să mă duc la un cîrpaci de dinţi. E o treabă care poate să se prelungească. Aşadar, armistiţiu".
Cîteva rîsete reţinute. Ireverenţiozităţi neexagerate. Scherbaum a etalat unele cunoştinţe ridicole: „Mult stimate domnule Starusch. Hotărîrea dumneavoastră, izvorîtă din durere, ne creează nouă, elevilor dumneavoastră compătimitori, obligaţia de a vă reaminti de martiriul Sfintei Apollonia. In anul 250, sub domnia împăratului Decius, acea blajină fecioară a fost arsă pe rug la Alexandria. Deoarece mai înainte gloata dezlănţuită îi smulsese cu cleştele toţi dinţii din gură, ea a devenit patroana tuturor celor care suferă de dureri de dinţi şi, în mod eronat, a dentiştilor. Pe fresce aflate la Milano şi Spoleto, pe bolţile unor biserici suedeze, de asemenea la Sterzing, Gmünd şi Lübeck, este reprezentată ţinînd în mînă un cleşte şi un molar. Petrecere frumoasă şi blîndă putere de îndurare. Noi, elevii dumneavoastră dintr-a XII-a A, ne vom ruga Sfintei Apollonia să vă ocrotească“.

[Severin Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pain, Protest, and the Numbness of Modern Life – My Reading of Günter Grass’s Local Anaesthetic

Reading Günter Grass’s Local Anaesthetic felt like sitting in a dentist’s chair — not only because much of the novel literally takes place in one, but because the experience is at once uncomfortable, revealing, and strangely hypnotic. Grass transforms the ordinary act of dental treatment into a metaphor for the spiritual paralysis of postwar Germany, and I found myself both fascinated and unsettled by his precision.

The protagonist, Eberhard Starusch, is a schoolteacher undergoing a root canal. As he lies in the dentist’s chair, he drifts between conversation and contemplation, haunted by his student Philipp Scherbaum — a radical youth planning to set himself on fire in protest against the Vietnam War. Through these fragmented reflections, Grass exposes the contradictions of a society numbed by routine yet simmering with guilt and suppressed outrage.

What struck me most was the rhythm of the prose: sharp, ironic, almost clinical. I could feel the tension between Starusch’s intellectual detachment and his buried unease, the sense that pain — both physical and moral — has been anesthetized by comfort and habit.

When I finished Local Anaesthetic, I couldn’t shake its aftertaste. Grass doesn’t accuse or console; he simply opens the mouth of a nation and shows what festers beneath the surface. The numbness, I realized, is the real disease.

[Patrick O'Rourke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starursh is embroiled in the Nazi past, the radical left present, his failed relationship and his huge dental operation.The book is in three parts . The style of the first part is like Celine on acid . The second and third parts are in conventional prose. It is very difficult to follow what is happening in the hallucinogenic first part. However everything is explained in the second part.
Interestingly two of the secondary characters share a something with Grass . His girlfriend Irmgard obsesses over her nazi past when she was seventeen. His student, Scherbaum, who is seventeen, wants to burn his dog as an act of protest against the Vietnam war. Starursh tries to reason with Irmgard about her guilt and tries to stop Scherbaum from making a tragic mistake. Their actions contrast with the real life Hubener who resisted the nazis during the war and was caught and executed.Grass was seventeen when he joined the Waffen SS, a fact he that didn't make public until nearly forty years later.
This books does explore rationalised regrets with starursh interaction with Irmgard, and attempted redemption, through his attempts to stop Scherbaum. Was Grass trying to explain himself and say that he wished someone had watched out for him as a youth? Or that his choice was wrong that it had no effect and was therefore innocuous. I gave it three stars because it will be only on rereading the first part, that i will get the full depth of this very good book.

[Ricardo Munguia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Una novela de la cual no se que pensar. Confusa, con una narración que brinca de tema en tema en los que se mezclan los recuerdos del narrador, con las opiniones del interlocutor y extrañamente programas de televisión. La narración carece de casi toda estructura y más bien son una serie de pensamientos medio hilados por un tema, pero la estructura temporal está toda revuelta

La historia va más o menos así, un profesor de secundaria va a consultar con un dentista y mientras estre le práctica cirugia ve en la televisión una serie de programas que se hilan con sus recuerdos de soldado en la segunda Guerra mundial y aquellas platicas con. Sus alumnos que protestan en contra de la guerra de Vietnam. La narración conjunta estos tres elementos y se hace muy difícil separarlos. El punto que la novela trata de ilustrar es que la violencia y el conflicto provienen del dolor, y que ese dolor puede ser distraído pero no eliminado como si se usará anestesia local. El punto me parece notable, pero la forma en como lo desarrolla me supera por mucho, pues es un libro bastante complicado.

La verdad no fue mucho de mi agrado, pero son libros como este los que hacen anotar mi deficiencia como lector. Creo que hay público para novelas como esta tal vez yo por no estar muy habituado me resto bastante difícil de leerla. Pero sin duda estoy seguro que habrá gente que la disfrutará enormemente.

[Amy Mischa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ultimately I think this book is fundamentally a failure but I'd much rather see people fail like this than succeed safely. It is, to some extent, about that mentality, after all. That attitude to trying and failing to do something novel and important.
Interesting that when I first read it I identified so much with the kid but this time around I felt like the Archangel. Such a gulf between generations. So much to atone for simply from the passing of the years.
I think the dentist might be disappearing from the world, ftr. The centrists are being forced to choose, at last, and, surprising nobody, they are choosing wrong. Thinking of Macron, and Starmer-Streeting. Expect that Germany is also shockingly close to seeing its metaphorical dentists choose wrong. To decide that racist violence is a kind of prophylaxis. In such moments, books like this are tremendously helpful as a kind of whetstone for the mind. What pain can be avoided? What pains will worsen, if not vaulted? Vaulted by processes that are, though more painful, temporary?
Tremendous book. Even though, as I say, it is probably a failure.

[Dave Kingsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished Local Anaesthetic at a gallop on my second attempt. Don't be put off by the surreal and somewhat disjointed opening - things come together quite quickly and the artistically-expanded viewpoint is actually far more lifelike than many a realist novel. Ralph Manheim's translation is remarkably good - it still sounds contemporary. Actually wish I'd read this freewheeling and adventurous novel when it first came out - read his 'Tin Drum' but this is better, tighter, funnier - because it might have inspired me to become a fiction writer. Anyone planning to write in the first-person couldn't find a better model, in my opinion. Ah well, never too late, eh?

[Alex G · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 1st part of this book is strangely enhanced by putting it down often, and letting one's life jump onto the dentist's screen. Disorienting to start, but it clears up as events unfold.

Apparently, it's a reaction to a documentary on the Hübener group, with Grass wanting to convey his desire that more citizens would have stood against the Nazis; I'll have to look more into this Helmuth Hübener...