The Flounder

About The Flounder

Günter Grass's The Flounder (Der Butt, 1977) is his most ambitious post-Danzig Trilogy novel — a vast history of patriarchy narrated through a talking flounder who advises men from the Neolithic to the 1970s. The novel traces the history of Danzig through eleven women cooks across the centuries, mixing recipes, poems, and narrative in a feminist-inflected rewriting of the Grimm fairy tale 'The Fisherman and His Wife.' Grass won the Georg Büchner Prize largely for this work. It shares the Danzig setting and encyclopedic ambition of the Danzig Trilogy but goes further in scope and formal experimentation.