…but The Guardian thinks the memoir, Skinning the Onion, isn’t half-bad:
Despite the controversy caused by the early chapters, the book actually becomes more interesting as the story progresses. The struggle of the immediate postwar years is vividly evoked, the years before the ‘economic miracle’ of the Fifties. Grass’s time in a displaced persons’ camp, for instance, is recalled as an amusing intermezzo: the lessons in ‘imaginary’ cooking, where the master chef would lovingly describe all the ingredients they never had any hope of finding, or the religious young man by the name of Joseph Ratzinger whom Grass claims to have befriended.