The Box

The Box

April 24, 2017 Autobiography novel

The novel The Box is a continuation of a kind of autobiographical cycle by Günther Grass, started by the book Peeling the Onion, but it is not necessary to read the first part of the novel to understand the text. The novel The Box is not narrated on behalf of the writer, but on behalf of his children. Grass writes as there are his children, and he had eight of them, decided to write down memories of the family and their childhood on a tape recorder. But in full, this novel is not an autobiography, many facts in the book have been changed, invented and embellished. To say what is true, and what was a figment of the author’s imagination is not so simple. Only about a few moments, we can say for sure that they did not happen. The names of the children have been changed, and the names of their mothers throughout the entire novel are not even mentioned. The only name known for sure is the name of the central character of the novel – Maria Rama. Around Maria all sorts of miracles occur in the novel, connected primarily with her boxing camera, which took absolutely unusual things and carried out her dreams. This camera can also be considered a character, because if it did not exist, nothing unusual would happen. This box, survived the war, took off both the past and the future, saw the invisible and embodied the impossible. There were no secrets for it, everything was open to its gaze. The photographs taken by Maria were a constant source of inspiration in the writer’s career of Günther Grass. Many times, in the pages of the novel, there are references to how Grass told her to take this or that photo, which eventually revealed the necessary for writing his works. It is worth noting that the role of photography in his novels was very serious. For example, the literary archive of Grass, now stored in the Berlin Academy, has more than six thousand photographs taken by his friends Hans and Maria Rama. I liked the novel, although I had complaints to the publication itself, there were often typos in the text, but they do not spoil the impression after reading of the book.  For me, someone interested in photography, it was extremely interesting to read it, and to enjoy the presentation of all those unusual pictures taken by the box-camera, which, unfortunately, in reality never existed. Or maybe this wonderful box still existed, who knows…

About the author

Jonathan Schindler: