A strong echo of "Oh ye of little faith" reverberates over the awarding of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature to the gifted German novelist, poet, artist, visionary and polemicist, Gunter Grass, who for so long has been yet another of those giant writers who should have been honoured but wasn't.
Yesterday's announcement on the 40th anniversary of the publication of his inspired epic, The Tin Drum, and, indeed, shortly before the international publication of his new novel, Mein Jahrhundert (My Century) should prove one of the most widely applauded of decisions.
It is also a courageous one by the Swedish Academy in the face of a European literary establishment not wholly united on the extent of Grass's artistic achievement because his politics have proved divisive.
Grass (72), a native of Danzig, now Gdansk, a grocer's son, is unique in many ways. His soaring imagination has never lost sight of the political realities of his country. He is the artist of uncertainty, capable of professing his love for Germany while at the same time stressing his abhorrence at its performance this century.
"I like this country," he has said, "I love it. I belong to its language and culture. Our traditional literature was entirely broken in this century by Nazism."
A lone voice of dissent during the jubilation greeting the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Grass, the fabulist and shaper of black fairy tales, has never opted for the popular. His opposition to reunification was based on a deep-rooted fear of history repeating itself.
"No one in his right mind and cursed with memory can allow so much power to be concentrated in the centre of Europe," he said in Dublin in 1991.
At that time even some of his western readers had turned against their hero. But his fears have been vindicated in part. Many Germans believe life was better before the wall came down.
Now regarded as one of the great novels of the 20th century, The Tin Drum, which examines or perhaps exposes Germany from 1925 to 1955, earned wide praise but also outraged Germans anxious to forget their past.
It was denounced as likely to endanger, if not destroy, the human soul and mind. Attempts were made to ban it. Other major works followed, including Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, The Flounder, The Rat, and his most recent, The Call of the Toad, a deliberately world-weary love story.
Grass, who had served in the German army towards the end of the second World War, was captured by American forces and held as a prisoner-of-war in Bavaria.
Regarded as a major influence on Latin American magic realism, both his art and his vision have deservedly earned him this honour.
