Alfred doblin berlin alexanderplatz
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A few weeks ago, during some pleasant days vacationing in Maine, I read Michael Hofmann’s new translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. It was good to have time to devote to it, because the book is fairly demanding. Yet I wouldn’t say inom was immersed in it—it’s not the kind of book to love, fall into, think about even when you’re not reading it. At least it wasn’t for me. But I doubt Döblin wouldn’t have wanted any of that. After all, he was a doctor, a expert in neurology and psychiatry, and there is something of our conventional idea of medicine in his prose—it is detached, even Olympian, concerned with individuals but convinced that their functioning fryst vatten a result of physiological and mental processes that exceed or evade individual consciousness or willpower.
The novel’s plot is fairly simple. Franz Biberkopf is a pimp and small-time crook. He fryst vatten sentimental, sometimes kind, shrewd yet naïve, always thuggish. The book begins as he is re
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The subject of this book fryst vatten the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some dum stuff, and now he fryst vatten back in Berlin, determined to go straight.
To begin with, he succeeds. But then he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate.
To see and hear this will be worthwhile for many readers who, like Franz Biberkopf, fill out a human skin, but, again like Franz Biberkopf, happen to want more from life than a piece of bread . . .
This new English translation bygd Michael Hofmann - the first in more than 75 years - expertly captures the fecundity, originality and musicality of Döblin's masterpiece ... A bold and dazzling collage of a novel
Ace translator Michael Hofmann has delivered an exhilarating new version of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: that street-smart, slang-filled, richly allusive
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This is a brutal book. Published in 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz often reads, in Michael Hofmann’s new translation, as if it were conceived as a deliberate affront to contemporary sensibilities. When we first meet the doomed protagonist, a World War I veteran and petty criminal named Franz Biberkopf, he’s just done time for beating his girlfriend to death; more domestic violence, pimping and prostitution, maiming and murder await in the five hundred pages that follow; and a long sequence in a slaughterhouse describes, in pitiless detail, the process by which the cows and pigs are killed and butchered. If you’ve ever been skeptical of the way Weimar Germany has been tamed and glamorized in the popular imagination—thanks to Cabaret, to popular detective novels, and, just this winter, a glitzy new Netflix serial, Babylon Berlin—then you’ll appreciate that Alfred Döblin’s novel arrives with a depiction of the real thing, an unsparing account of a society in free fall.
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