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.

Rare is the novel that captures the real grit of an era in time with such stark detail. Dublin masterfully captured the zeitgeist of late Weimar Germany, with intense drama and vivid imagery. Hofmann's translation is gripping and fluid. This is a work that stands tall alongside the best examples of modernist literature, deserving of mention alongside Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities, Buddenbrooks, The Sound and the Fury, etc.

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.