Berlin Alexanderplatz Paperback – February 28, 2019

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.

I learned about this novel because I watched Fassbinder's film (with the same title) & both are masterpieces.

This is a very interesting book: for its time and beyond, innovative, cacophonous, controversial, violent and cruel, sometimes lyrical and erudite, sometimes rough and vulgar--really difficult to believe it was written in 1929. The fluid and convolluted stream of consciousness blended with a myriad of other sources (mass propaganda, weather forecasts, local news items and scandalous newspapers, popular songs, and a lot of street noise) seem to make it a pair to Joyce's Ulysses, but soon BA moves underground to the life of street gangs in Berlin, with their 'jobs' and crude violence, especially against women (something that to me was rather shocking) and an ocean sets the two novels apart.So while many compare BA with Joyce's U and there are good stylistic reasons for that, thematically U seems extremely naive compared with BA, one novel written by a theoretical scholar (conscious about but insulated from the troubles of the real world) and another by a street artist (who has to fight everyday to buy her next meal). Almost ten years set apart the publication of U (1920) and BA (1929), one in Paris (having been written for the most part in peaceful Zurich, Trieste), the other in pre-nazi Germany, and that also helps to set different tones. Joyce had his own personal financial challenges, but Doblin was a clinical doctor at the Buch insane asylum learning for any years about the harsh lives of people just like the characters of his book. To me, it was really meaningful that Joyce in U takes Leopold Bloom to the Dlugacz's butchershop for him to buy and enjoy his piece of pork kidney, while Doblin in BA takes us to the slaughterhouse to witness the painful death of each kind of animal (cattle, calves, sheep and pigs), how they are put down and sliced up, with a richness of details that only those who have already been to a slaughterhouse can really appreciate.BA's collage takes some of the cinematographic influence of the early 20th-century literature to a new level (one could think of Mahler's "sampling" which started more or less at the same time), some passages where the language becomes extremely fluid, coloquial and edited/cut in fragments are just like a modern graphic novel/comic book. In certain passages, it is as expressionist as Kafka or Canetti, in others it sounds like Tom Waits' "Underground"; one passage is like listening to Friedrich Hollander's 'Munchhausen', but then it turns into David Mamet's Heist, Al Pacino paying a visit to Charlize Theron in Devil's Advocate and then some. It is true that the exuberant use of collage makes the pace of the story very much erratic, sometimes extremely slow, sometimes in a total frenzy, a kind of unbalanced rythmn. The last quarter of the novel moves really fast like the conclusion of a play by Shakespeare where all pieces quickly move to be put together (and small characters like the plumber Karl Matter aka Otto Fischer out of blue gains important roles), but then the action vanishes and suddenly stops, and then slowly crawls to a somewhat pale conclusion (the opposite of modern, action movies--and maybe it is interesting to check what Burhan Qurbani did in his new movie version of the story!)All the violence at the last quarter of the novel made me think of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, speaking about the survival of the fittest (the way some crops survive the cold by converting starch into sugar) but insisting on how the human being can be good and virtuous in a world of filth and injustice (where the story of the biblical Job certainly plays an important part). An article signed by Amanda deMarco for the WSJ highlights that "for as jarring as Doblin's tactics may be, Franz is as complex as any chacter in a traditional novel," which is something I agree and certainly sets U and BA apart. There is no way to compare Franz Biberkopf with Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom, or Mitzi with Molly Bloom, and this lack of character complexity makes BA fall a little short imho. BA is a sensational book for all the energy it contains, but much of it just dissipates in the thin air after its reverberant explosion. For a book written just a few years before the rise of nazism in Germany, I also fet that the political tension is described very subtly if not altogether played-down, especially considering that Doblin was a Jew and actually left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire only 4 years after the publication of BA. But as translator Michael Hoffman says in his Afterword, "a masterpiece is always a mixed blessing." Indeed, praise for Hoffmann's work with his "the opaque is my enemy" strategy, much helpful compared, for instance, with Irene Aron's difficult (and imho sometimes misled) translation to Portuguese.

If you recognize the quote from Hesse's 'Steppenwolf' that I borrowed for the title of my review, you are welcome here. But do not think it will be as easy as the Hesse. This is a bizarre weird book that goes off on tangents from Doblin's versions of Bible stories, classic mythology & even advertisements. It is an oddly Christ or Buddha-like journey of degradation and suffering that finally leads to enlightenment.It is also more truly Modern than Joyce (who has certain similarities but I hate for his intentional obscurity & unlikable characters) or any others of the Modernism movement. It is written in deep slang to the point of being a little hard to figure out at first even in translation. It is all over the place and doesn't try to keep to a linear narrative nor to use 'Literary' language. Even my own writing ('Tales from the ER and Other Places, or Always Eat the Lamb Brains!' -sorry for the plug, but there is a point), which I wrote before I encountered 'B. Alexanderplatz', can be interpreted as indirectly owing a debt to this book. Of all the Modern novels, this one seems to have anticipated &/or moved Literature to where it is today more than anything else.All those wonderful things aside, keep in mind it is a difficult baffling novel that will demand more from you than most. But if you are willing to put in the work, it will be tremendously worthwhile.