Berlin Alexanderplatz

Bad paper quality. Poor print

Astonishing. What a ride! I haven't read anything so good for a long time, in fact maybe never. We follow a short period in the protagonist Franz's petty, criminal life, as he moves from bar to bar, job to job, girl to girl, and tries to go straight after release from prison, in a wild stream-of-consciousness tour de force that is so much more than just a novel. It is interspersed randomly and somewhat chaotically with scenes from Berlin life - the abattoir (nauseating and heartbreaking), the theatre advert (made me laugh out loud) - and is strewn with parts of the Bible and classic myths, word-plays, tenderness and violence. The crazy jumble of language and action is incredible. Read it.

As Joyce's Ulysses is the great novel of Dublin, this, assuredly, is the great novel of Berlin. Michael Hoffmann as translater is fully equal to the task .. I read it and then I read it again. It continues to startle.

Reading “Berlin Alexanderplatz” is like visiting a tawdry, run-down funfair in a shabby seaside town. Thrills and spills, overstimulation of all the senses. Shady characters lurking in every corner. You’re not sure whether at some point the whole thing will go kaputt and hurtle you out of control into Kingdom Come. The story starts with Everyman Franz Biberkopf released from Berlin’s Tegel prison in the late 1920s. Incidentally, by the time we realise what he’s been doing time for, it’s too late - we are already invested in him as a character. Franz is overwhelmed by the city’s chaos but determined to lead an honest life. He picks up casual work as a street hawker, but his good intentions are put to the test again and again by fate and the city itself (personified as “The Whore of Babylon.”) Franz’s own tale of betrayal, violence, crime, poverty, alcohol, pimps, prostitutes and gangsters is interspersed with an impressionistic collage depicting the hubbub of the city. There are train timetables and weather reports, an interlude in a Berlin abbatoir, advertising, popular songs and shaggy dog stories about random characters. On top of that are layered biblical allusions and characters - some parts are every bit as surreal and bonkers as Jung’s Red Book. The narrator interjects occasionally to keep readers on track with what is happening. This translation is a brilliant example of how AI translations can never completely replace the work of human beings. The translator skillfully captures the zoom in/zoom out chaos, precariousness and instability of 1920s Berlin. He achieves both a sense of time and place, and a timelessness and universality. It’s a superb achievement. I’d be interested (one day) in tackling the original German version - and seeing Fassbinder’s 1980 TV/film version.

I suppose translations are a necessary evil. I can read novels in French Spanish and Italian but realised finally my very basic German would not allow me to read this classic novel in its own language. You are always left wondering... I found the languagse of the translation unlike anything I have read in English, and more readily associated it with exaggerated British sit-coms or carry-on films... Words like "geezer" "bint" "eejit" occur and reoccur as the style becomes increasingly odd, jangly (some would say jazzy), cartoonish, and oblique. You have to trust the Translator, but I found the "translation" the most difficult obstacle to overcome reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, certainly to begin with. Translation aside this is truly an extraordinary novel which will leave no one indifferent. Döblin is compared to Joyce, but I think this is only fair in as much as Ulysses is Dublin, and Berlin Alexanderplatz is Berlin... Joyce is benevolent whereas Doblin's vision is of a gritty seedy lowlife criminal underbelly, where existence itself is captured in all its pitiless savage reality. Perhaps because of the biblical intrusions I was reminded more of Don Passos' Manhattan Transfer, but this novel is uniquely Döblin's, a great torrent of language, ideas, events and accidents, a teeming ferment on every level, which ulrimately indelibly defines the troubled city of the late 1920s. Berlin is perhaps the greatest character here. It is a breathtaking tumult which will grip you and not let you go. The characters are gripping, the portraits of relationships between men and women, between prostitutes and pimps, between thieves and thieves ... It can be tender brutal lyrical and violent in the spur of a moment. The style is a whirlwind, the description of streets and buildings, of shops and tram journeys, there are newspaper reports and advertisements, there are poems and songs, and the stunning biblical interventions... There is a long poignant description of animals led to slaughter. There is an unusual passage where Newtonian formulae are used to show how Ida"s sternum was crushed by Franz. I could go on. The list is endless. The book seems infinite in its resources. It simoly never ceases to absorb and to amaze. It is simply one of a kind. I truly hope to read it someday free of translation.

Read a good book review in 'The Economist" about it. It's just aligned with the journal's point of view without giving me satisfaction from a literary or historical content point of view.