Rating: 
Summary: Coming together
Review: The 'Wonder Years' of the characters populating this book were cynically appropriated by an ideology of hate. Whatever Mahlke was his condition certainly wasn't one that I would be happy to expose my children too. That is, until a point arrives in their lives where the terrifying moral turmoil that rages amongst us in can be intellectually accommodated. Cat and Mouse is an exploration of the significance of that confusion in an individual's appraisal of the part he played in the disaster of the Third Reich. Of memory and of a terrible forgetfulness. The book is full to overflowing with mythical, primeval images, the power of which can seduce the reader into believing they are entering an individuals take on the flickering images of personal memory. The magical quality of these images serve to highlight something far more sinister, something consciously utilised by the recruiting sergeants of Hitler's Germany. The narrator uses the tools of Nazism to reccount this story because he has no choice. Cat and Mouse portrays a nightmare landscape of guilt-ridden memory, not of an individual facing forces he is ill equipped to deal with, but of a people, complicit in the moral bankruptcy of a nations history.
Rating:
Summary: Clever, moving, insightful; instantly a classic
Review: This is a sensitively written tale of Joachim Mahlke and his "mouse" (that up-and-down-bobbing Adam's apple of his) -- through the eyes of an unreliable narrator reminiscing about his youth, and life, and morals, and how ordinary, decent people, some of them children, lived in Hitler's Germany. Realistic, telling, bittersweet. Lots of little chases and reflections: hence cat and mouse. Often uproariously funny, sometimes with a deeper message, sometimes just for humor. Cat and Mouse is the most purely enjoyable book I've read in a long time. Perhaps not the most challenging to read (that's not always a bad thing), but definitely the most enjoyable. There's lots of subsurface musing about war and the morality of killing... for an American, it reminds one of the collective guilt brought about by Vietnam. (But it is never in-your-face war-musings a la Tim O'Brien or anyone like that.) Yes, these teenage boys joined the Hitler Youth and aspired to shoot at British airplanes; but can we blame them? And can they morally redeem themselves decades later -- and need they? A side point: I was shocked by one frequent error among reviewers here. How can people read this book and think that it is set in Poland! Its German setting is perhaps its most salient feature. It is set in what was then Germany, although that part of Germany became Poland after WW2.
Rating: 
Summary: quirky fable not up to Tin Drum calibre..
Review: This second installment of the Danzig Trilogy was an overall disappointment. While Gunter Grass's flair for story-telling is all here, Cat and Mouse does not stretch into the varied themes touched by Tin Drum (..the first book of the trilogy). Cat and Mouse reads more like an early John Irving novel (..with a German/Polish twist) rather than profound literature (with all due respect to Mr. Irving, who has written some wonderful stuff in recent years). Cat and Mouse is a story growing up (..mostly high school years) in German occupied Poland during WW II. The characters are quirky (..especially the boy with a protruding Adam's apple) and amusing. But this coming-of-age tale has been told better elsewhere. Bottom line: read Tin Drum. Cat and Mouse will seem stale (and hastily written) by comparison, but fans of Gunter Grass probably won't complain much.
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