Rating: 
Summary: A good story
Review: "Cat and Mouse" is a beautiful and dark story. It tells of teenagers coming to adulthood around the war years in Germany. The writing style is engrossing, and the characters are very vivid.
Rating: 
Summary: Moving
Review: A poignant tale of growing up in the Fuhrer's Germany and the cost it had on the lives of ordinary and even decent individuals. A good link between 'Tin Drum' and 'Dog Years'.
Rating: 
Summary: What on Earth is this book talking about??!!
Review: Being a member of a local book club, I was given an Arabic print of this book to read. From the first paragraph, I could not comprehend a single word, so I blamed it all on the Arabic translator and bought an English one. Still, no luck. I felt quite stupid for not understanding a Nobel winner book! but after reading reviews here and there, I came to the conclusion that this novel can only be read in its native language, German. So if you cant read German, I dont suggest that you toture yourself with reading any other version of it.
Rating:
Summary: What on Earth is this book talking about??!!
Review: Being a member of a local book club, I was given an Arabic print of this book to read. From the first paragraph, I could not comprehend a single word, so I blamed it all on the Arabic translator and bought an English one. Still, no luck. I felt quite stupid for not understanding a Nobel winner book! but after reading reviews here and there, I came to the conclusion that this novel can only be read in its native language, German. So if you cant read German, I dont suggest that you toture yourself with reading any other version of it.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Read......
Review: Cat and Mouse is the star of the Danzig Trilogy. It is short and to the point. The characters vivid and "knowable." Grass is a writer that everone should give a shot. I suggest my method -- two or three pots of Turkish coffe at a local shop and a free afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: Heroism
Review: Definitely worth reading. Within the story, Grass has raised the question of what heroism really means. There are different "heroes" in the story, and are called heroes for different reasons. He ridicules what heroism is considered to be, and indirectly asks; does this type of "heroism" deserve to be rewarded? Another aspect to the novella that struck me was the narration. Pilenz, the narrator, writes an perhaps almost confessional story about a period in his life that happened years ago. His memory, which fails him in some respects and serves him well in others, can perhaps not be trusted in regards to 'what really happened' and why. I think Grass's main point here is questioning what war-heroism really is, and the way it is/was considered is not necessarily "correct".
Rating:
Summary: Another success
Review: For a writer whose works have often been charged with clear political and socioeconomic talk, Grass's "Cat and Mouse" is refreshingly atypical. This is a story about childhood - a childhood very particular to Danzig approaching and amidst World War II - but most specific and intentionally a character development. What is missing here is Grass's usual voice, arguing over historical choices or social problems, and he with expected self-consciousness restrains such a narrator from surfacing. Not to say, of course, that one will find such debates of his uninteresting or something to set this above, but this is simply not that novel. In such respects, two of Grass's shortest books, "Cat and Mouse" and "Headbirths," are quite bipolar in means of conveyance, the latter finding its novelistic aspects very tentative and nonfixed to the purpose. Grass here writes with the full power of his playful and engaging style, and this is the novel that takes the form: "all that summer we... in the winter... but the following year," memoir-style traversing upper-school years. As you may expect, however the form, Gunter Grass is writing with messages in mind, particularly in thoughts central to greatness and heroism. This is the first of Grass's Danzig trilogy I have viewed, and I understand after reading "The Tin Drum" my fondness for this novel may be encapsulated. Nevertheless, "Cat and Mouse" is short, strong, and everything I had anticipated.
Rating:
Summary: Another success
Review: For a writer whose works have often been charged with clear political and socioeconomic talk, Grass's "Cat and Mouse" is refreshingly atypical. This is a story about childhood - a childhood very particular to Danzig approaching and amidst World War II - but most specific and intentionally a character development. What is missing here is Grass's usual voice, arguing over historical choices or social problems, and he with expected self-consciousness restrains such a narrator from surfacing. Not to say, of course, that one will find such debates of his uninteresting or something to set this above, but this is simply not that novel. In such respects, two of Grass's shortest books, "Cat and Mouse" and "Headbirths," are quite bipolar in means of conveyance, the latter finding its novelistic aspects very tentative and nonfixed to the purpose. Grass here writes with the full power of his playful and engaging style, and this is the novel that takes the form: "all that summer we... in the winter... but the following year," memoir-style traversing upper-school years. As you may expect, however the form, Gunter Grass is writing with messages in mind, particularly in thoughts central to greatness and heroism. This is the first of Grass's Danzig trilogy I have viewed, and I understand after reading "The Tin Drum" my fondness for this novel may be encapsulated. Nevertheless, "Cat and Mouse" is short, strong, and everything I had anticipated.
Rating:
Summary: The second part of the Danzig Trilogy holds up just as well
Review: I first read Cat and Mouse without the benefit of having read The Tin Drum beforehand, and I missed a lot. Cat and Mouse is the second book in Grass' Danzig Trilogy, three books that look at life in Danzig under the Nazi regime from three different points of view (the tales are told concurrently, and time can be fixed by seeing the same event from different points of view; for example, the picnic taken by the jazz trio and Schmuh in Book III of The Tin Drum shows up towards the end of Cat and Mouse, and Matern, one of the main characters of Dog Years, shows up in The Onion Cellar, where Oskar's jazz band is retained, in The Tin Drum). Cat and Mouse is actually a novella, originally a part of Dog Years that broke off and took on a life of its own; on the surface it is the tale of Joachim Mahlke, a high school student with a protruding adam's apple (the Mouse of the title), and his fascination with a sunken Polish minesweeper after he learns to swim at the age of thirteen. It is also the story of Pilenz, the narrator and Mahlke's best friend. The two spend their high school years in wartime Poland, reacting to various things, and that's about as much plot as this little slice of life needs. The interesting thing about Cat and Mouse is its complete difference in tone from the other two novels. Both The Tin Drum and (what I've read so far of) Dog Years have the same high-pitched, almost hysterical humor combined with a profound sense of teleology (not surprising given the apocalyptic nature of life in Danzig under the Nazis); Grass attempts to confront the horror with over-the-top slapstick, because only through that kind of comparison is it possible to make the reader understand. But while Cat and Mouse has its moments of the same kind of ribald humor, it is more dignified, in a sense, and closer to reality; enough so, at least, that when the book reaches its inevitable climax and denoument, one feels more genuine, or more human, reactions to the fates of Pilenz and Mahlke than one does to Oskar, the hero of The Tin Drum. Perhaps that is why it was segmented off from Dog Years; perhaps there was another reason. Whatever the case, it stands on its own and as an integral part of Grass' magnum opus.
Rating:
Summary: Genial!
Review: I studied this book in a University German class some years ago, and was struck by Grass's sensitive and funny portrayal of youths growing up in wartime Danzig. He somehow manages to be both funny and poignant, sort of like a German version of the TV show The Wonder Years. His main character, Mahlke, is both likeable and enigmatic and is characterised by the wonderful detail inherent in most of Grass's work. If you can, try to read the German-language version, as I don't think the English is quite as good.
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