The book controversy I found most intriguing was the issue surrounding Gunter Grass. Unlike the scandal of other fake memoirs, such as "A Million Little Pieces", Grass doesn't make up fake truths about himself in his books. Instead, Grass leaves a key piece of information out. During World War II Grass spent some time as a member of the SS. But the problem wasn't that he hid it in his memoir "Peeling the Onion". The problem was that he spent about 60 years after the war publishing books and making waves in the political world without mentioning that little fact.
Now, I'm not going to touch the content of Grass's secret, as that is a whole other type of discussion. Who Grass is as a person, how people should view him, how they should view his political activism is a conversation that could fill any number of blog posts. But beyond that, in terms of the literature I think there's two very different things to consider.
The first and foremost is that, when writing a chronicle of his life, Grass told the truth, at least as far as we know. The great revelation was in the book, not discovered some time later like with other memoir issues (e.g. A Million Little Pieces). Whether you agree or disagree with who Grass is, whether you choose to buy the book or not, is up to each reader individually. But what you see is what you get for the content, just like with any other memoir.
The second thing to consider is the rest of his body of work. But the one thing people need to remember, is that the author is not his characters. I see this kind of argument a lot. "How can you like that book? It was written by X-author, who is a terrible person." or "How could Y author, who is such a big feminist, write a character like that?" And every time it boils down to, the author is not their characters. Unless you want to live in a world that contains no fiction at all you have to allow for that distinction.
In the end, in this situation, the decision is as it ever was. You either buy the book or you don't. You either know everything about the author or you don't. In times past, before we became so celebrity focused there was a pretty big chance most of the readers of a given book didn't know anything about the authors they read. The work stood on its own. Maybe it was better that way.
I actually had a conversation with one of my co-workers a few weeks ago about your second point. We ended up on the subject of Ender's Game, and my co-worker said that it was one of is favorite books growing up, but that Orson Scott Card's remarks on same-sex marriage around the time the film was released really tarnished his opinion of the story and where it had come from. I said that in those cases I try to separate the work from its maker, that people of dubious morals and persuasions can sometimes create something truly memorable and wonderful that it becomes bigger than they are. I know it can be hard for some people to distinguish the artist from the work, but they may miss a lot of truly interesting and inspiring stories if they don't.
ReplyDelete