Rating: 
Summary: Ideas better than the plot
Review: This novel shows Grass curious as ever about the role of Germany since WWII, but growing weary of fiction and the unending debates in the real world. The plot with Konny and David never holds any surprises, and the trajectory of the novel rarely rises above the mundane. Full of detail about the ship and the three men who intersected to bring about its tragic end, you find much to learn about the times, but this could have been a better non-fictional work of journalism by Grass. The clumsy author-narrator dichotomy appears listless, and the Grandmother talks, in the translation of her Low German, like some intellectual's attempt at Ma Kettle.
A true account such as Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier or a history such as Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, 1945 give context that readers curious about the collapse of the Baltic front will gain much from. Grass' short novella fails to convince as fiction, even if much of it is borrowed from--and better left as--fact to confront and contend with and against.
Rating: 
Summary: Grass best effort since the Danzig Trilogy
Review: This short but engrossing novel is one of a new trend of German literature that starts looking less at German guilt and more to German suffering during World War II. Several authors have recently taken the call of W.G. Sebald to explore the reality of the enormous suffering inflicted on German civilians by the victorious allies. The point is not to deny German crimes or German guilt but to complete the historical record of World War II by presenting the viewpoint from the defeated. Grass unimpeachable moral standing helps along the effort started by Walter Kempowski with his series "Das Echolot" (no english traslation yet) and more recently by Jorg Friedrich in "Der Brand" about the allied bombing of German cities.It is a testament to the indifference about the atrocities inflicted by the victorious allies, that the story of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" is so obscure and practically unknown despite the sheer number of dead, at least 5 times more than in the "Titanic". Grass treatment of the subject is not only factual, he gives us all the facts about both the ship and his namesake, but also is literary in a grand way. The story carefully interweaves the past drama of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" with the present drama of the narrator Paul Prokiefke. Grass resucitates one of the characters of "Cat and Mouse", Tulla Prokiefke, as a survivor of the tragedy and instigator of the tradegy of her own grandson. "Crabwalk" is as readable and compelling as "Cat and Mouse" and has a few susprising turns which makes it in my opinion the best literary effort of Grass since "Dog Years". One of its greatest attributes of the novel is that it treats a delicate subject, like german suffering during the World War II without moral ambiguities and absolutely excludes the possibility of being labeled "revanchist".
Rating: 
Summary: It will never end
Review: Within this novel, the narrator effectively uses the characters personal observations of, as well as documents from, the past (of whose accuracy we cannot be completely certain) to obtain an understanding of the characters present day condition and motivations. The book demonstrates how remembrances (whether true or false) of this era of German history can provide useful fodder, fodder which forms our personal relationship with the past and which can guide or justify behavior in the present. And how the resulting behavior (e.g. pro or anti skinhead movements), can in turn, provide more "useful material" to be further manipulated by either. "It will never end". Translation could have been better, thus 4 and not 5 stars.
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