Half-Dead Cats in a Potato Sack

The Tin Drum Diaries, Part 2

I’m 200 pages in now, which is less than a third of the way through, but as is evident, I’m having a hard time finding things to write about. That’s not The Tin Drum’s fault, it’s mine; or, most likely, it’s the fault of my ambition, attempting to overdetermine what this would be at the outset and maybe paralyzing myself. Flannery O’Connor (Her Highness) says that coming in with an idea — “I am going to write a story about loneliness!” — is a stupid, doomed-to-fail way to write.

But here it is, 12:36 in the morning, and I do have something. This enterprise is, in part, about this being my mother’s favorite book, and I’ve been hoping there would be some good opportunities to highlight some of the very particular aspects of my mother through this, and boy did I come upon one tonight:

In the chapter “Faith, Love, Hope,” our narrator, Oskar, departs a little from the norm, even for Oskar, who doesn’t really have a norm, to tell one story over and over again, Exercises in Style-style; it’s the story of a trumpet player who usually gets drunk and plays beautifully, who goes to his friend’s funeral, comes back to his house bummed out and all out of gin, finds the nasty smell of his four tomcats, one of whom is named Bismarck (this detail makes it into every version of the story) especially offensive that day, so he kills them all with a fire poker, stuffs them in a potato sack, and stuffs the potato sack in the garbage can in the alleyway behind his apartment building, with some difficulty. It turns out the cats are not all the way dead and possibly manage to escape the garbage can; that part I don’t know, because I haven’t finished the chapter yet, I put the book down to write this.

So that’s a chapter in my mother’s favorite book. It’s macabre and absurd and upsetting and poignant and European and speaks to the human condition and, to use a word I know I will use several times in these diaries, the real key word for my mother, it’s “quirky.”

That’s it! That’s all I have to say for now. Marinate on that insight into my mother’s aesthetic sensibilities as you eagerly await the next entry.