If you're in your 80s, have received two pacemakers and have enjoyed "decades of self-indulgence in hand-rolled cigarettes and well-stuffed pipes," your thoughts are bound to turn toward death. In Of All That Ends, a posthumously published collection of poems and lyric prose, Nobel laureate Günter Grass (The Tin Drum) contemplates his mortality and the fate of a world he's soon to depart. He does so with morbid wit and more than a trace of sorrow. This book, illustrated with many of Grass's drawings, addresses topics that range from his last remaining lower tooth, which he says "would also make a suitable Christmas tree ornament, like a pearl on a pendant," to German chancellor Angela Merkel, Aleppo, the Greek financial crisis and "the bombs exploding daily in Iraq."
But it's not all gloom and doom. In one poem, he writes of a beloved typewriter, "sleek and elegant in form, as if Leonardo da Vinci had invented the typewriter on the side." And he reminds us that there's often plenty of life left in an old body. When 80-something Grass says he's too old to write prose, the 101-year-old scholar he complained to "took me sharply to task," pointing out that there's "so much that's new, still untasted.... It's all right to be amazed again." The message of this moving collection is clear: life ends, but assuming you're in control of the matter, that's no reason to limp across the finish line. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer