Yet, Grass does not exhibit any enthusiasm or even his typical anger. He only shows a dreary ill-temper directed against India and the city which he had wanted to visit so much. The best he can do is scatter words like 'misery,' 'slums' and 'garbage' throughout the text, dryly and monotonously.... Let me call it Kali's revenge. She has robbed this powerfully eloquent German inventor of stories who had wanted to defy her with the weapons of European Enlightenment, suddenly of his own tongue.
Peter von Becker on Show Your Tongue