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A review by jpegben
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
5.0
Berlin Alexanderplatz twists and churns and pulsates with a sickening, cloying energy. It's unlike any book I've read, so unique and inventive and disturbing. Franz Biberkopf is one of the great literary creations - his volcanic laugh, his appetite for violence, his meanness, his coarseness, his stupidity. He's a pure distillation of base instinct and the riff raff which exists in the substratum of any society.
I love expressionism and I think this is the greatest expressionistic novel ever written. It's grotesque, revelatory, and deeply apocalyptic as man and society lurch towards the end times . Human destinies are boiled into gruel in a giant, spluttering urban cauldron. Berlin seethes with resentment and anger and greedy self-entitlement. In essence, Döblin shows us what happens when social relations begin to collapse. When the mob seizes control. When the fraudster and the thug, the double dealer and the enforcer, become arbiters of what is good and right and just. Men like Franz and Reinhold and their brutish acquaintances have always existed, but create a Darwinian social order when empowered:
I think Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the high points of high modernism. The use of montage as a device is cinematic in its effect. I rarely read works where I feel so completely immersed in the setting. The nonlinearity also works seamlessly. In terms of prose, there is so much richness and texture (Michael Hoffman's brilliant translation is one of the best I've ever encountered). Reading this, it's not difficult to see how German society at the time was an incubator for Nazism. The sense of fatalism, paranoia, and impending social collapse. Of the Whore of Babylon grinning at the ruination before her.
It's January and I've already got a read of the year contender because this book is one of the most underrated masterpieces - at least in the Anglosphere - which I've ever read and a personal favourite already.
I love expressionism and I think this is the greatest expressionistic novel ever written. It's grotesque, revelatory, and deeply apocalyptic as man and society lurch towards the end times . Human destinies are boiled into gruel in a giant, spluttering urban cauldron. Berlin seethes with resentment and anger and greedy self-entitlement. In essence, Döblin shows us what happens when social relations begin to collapse. When the mob seizes control. When the fraudster and the thug, the double dealer and the enforcer, become arbiters of what is good and right and just. Men like Franz and Reinhold and their brutish acquaintances have always existed, but create a Darwinian social order when empowered:
Because when worms eat soil and make more, they always eat the same stuff. The creatures can’t stop once they’ve had a healthy breakfast, they need to stuff themselves the next day as well. And it’s the same way with people, and with fire: it’s hungry if it’s burning, and when it can’t eat, it goes out, that’s the way of it.
I think Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the high points of high modernism. The use of montage as a device is cinematic in its effect. I rarely read works where I feel so completely immersed in the setting. The nonlinearity also works seamlessly. In terms of prose, there is so much richness and texture (Michael Hoffman's brilliant translation is one of the best I've ever encountered). Reading this, it's not difficult to see how German society at the time was an incubator for Nazism. The sense of fatalism, paranoia, and impending social collapse. Of the Whore of Babylon grinning at the ruination before her.
It's January and I've already got a read of the year contender because this book is one of the most underrated masterpieces - at least in the Anglosphere - which I've ever read and a personal favourite already.