DER BUTT - THE FLOUNDER - EL RODABALLO

The greatest Germanophone author for adults of our times, Günter Grass, is deceased.
(A minute of silence for Günter Grass...)

(By the way, in my opinion, the greatest Germanophone author for children and youth of our times, Michael Ende, is also deceased. A minute of silence for Ende as well...)

While thinking of the gender ratio and character alignment in both Othello and Dokidoki Precure, I suddenly thought of my favourite novel by the late Herr Grass. A subversive historical and "herstorical" epic of feminist and dramatic importance. So here is my review of it!

(It's also interesting that, in Dokidoki Precure, most of the victims [including the one who started it all] and the immortal corrupter are male, while those who purify the victims and seal the corrupter away are an all-female team of heroines. Just like in Othello...)

There's also Der Butt (The Flounder, El rodaballo), by Günter Grass: an epic historical feminist... or should we say "herstorical" fresco spawning from the Neolithic Revolution, when the male gender usurped the power of matriarchy, to the much more recent times of the Iron Curtain, via the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the Enlightenment, Napoleonic occupation in Central Europe, the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and both World Wars. 
It's also a novel for bon vivants, in which a set table looks temptingly in every link of the chain of tales. Though you have got to be wary if there are mushrooms of any kind on the menu...

Throughout this great novel, a family saga that is also a chain of historical and herstorical tales linked together, males are revealed as the "evil" gender motivated by stubbornness and lust for power (they force outgroups to turn to their religion and/or ideologies with fire and sword, start great wars, vie for power against each other, rape maidens, beat women and children...), while females are more clever, more sensible, and always able to best their spear counterparts. A pagan priestess, Mestwina, serves up a soup laced with amber as an effective love potion, and then a more intoxicating soup --a cocktail of mead and the red spotted mushrooms-- to the Archbishop of Prague, recently arrived up north to her domains to introduce Christianity. And then, once he is deeply entranced, she kills him with a quick stroke of her ladle.

A prioress by the nickname of Fat Grete stifles a wealthy grand-bourgeois in bed, as Herr Ferber and she are having sexual intercourse.

A Prussian country girl accompanies an Enlightened Count Rumford throughout the heart of Europe, and both of them introduce potatoes to local smallfolk throughout the lands. Together. With the same importance, both he and she.

A French governor appointed by Napoleon is affected with strange issues after his personal cook, Sophie Rotzoll, whose fiancé is pining away in Graudenz Fortress, serves her master, General Jean Rapp, his favourite dish of mushrooms laced with a few extra species (Sophie knows every fungus in the Prussian woodlands, and the effects that some of them produce).

Then there's Lena, the proletarian feminist who wrote that famous cookbook. Losing both her husbands to the various wars of those days, and her four daughters as well, never stopped her solidarity or her devotion to the cause of women's rights...

The lands where the story is set, along the Baltic coast, are at first those of the Ava Clan, then become of a patriarchal clan, then Hanseatic, then Prussian, and finally Polish. Rulers change, art styles change, the balance of power shifts. Yet the conflicts and the sorrows and the hopes and the joys remain always the same.

Recommended if you, dear reader, like Westeros, strong female characters (of the really badass kind), dynamics where she is the agressive one and he is the passive one, history, herstory, subverting gender roles, good food, stories about the downfall of the powerful...

I give this book four stars and a half (because it's not perfect, after all): ****'