FOR years I was frustrated, and a bit embarrassed, to admit that I didn’t much like the work of Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died Monday. He was, after all, Germany’s most acclaimed writer of the postwar era — not just our national poet, but for many Germans, our conscience. Yet he did not speak to me.

His novel “Crabwalk,” published in 2002, was the first book I felt I didn’t have to finish. I was angry with myself. I took pride in finishing every book I started, and here was a novel I should have found impossible not to like: It dealt with memory, and the Nazis; it used the metaphor of the crab’s gait to show how Germans had to go backward to turn forward, not only with regard to what they had done as Nazis but also what the war had done to those who weren’t Nazis — and to their children, to people like me.

Yet his work didn’t work on me. The best explanation I could give myself back then for giving up on him was that I simply didn’t like his style.

I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.