Berlin Alexanderplatz

Description

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann The subject of this book is 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 stupid stuff, and now he is 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 . . .

Alfred D blin, one of the great figures of German modernism, was born in 1878 to a Jewish family. He moved to Berlin at the age of ten, where he remained for the next 45 years. D blin's 1929 masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz made him famous, but he was forced to flee to France and then Los Angeles during the years of the Nazi dictatorship. He died in 1957. Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator from the German. For Penguin he has translated four books by Hans Fallada, in addition to works by Franz Kafka, Ernst J nger, Irmgard Keun and Jakob Wassermann.

This new English translation by Michael Hofmann - the first in more than 75 years - expertly captures the fecundity, originality and musicality of Doeblin's masterpiece ... A bold and dazzling collage of a novel * The National * Ace translator Michael Hofmann has delivered an exhilarating new version of Alfred Doeblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: that street-smart, slang-filled, richly allusive tale of crime, punishment and social crisis in the capital of Weimar Germany just before Hitler's rise to power. Hofmann's firecracker prose fizzes through this revolutionary trip into the lower depths of big-city life -- Boyd Tonkin The classic Weimar novel ... Long branded untranslatable, a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers * Economist * Reading it was the most wonderful experience -- Deborah Moggach * Saturday Review * Franz Biberkopf is one of the modern world's richest literary characters, as memorable as Woyzeck, Oblomov or Madame Bovary * New York Review of Books * Berlin Alexanderplatz is Europe's Moby-Dick ... both seriously significant and a great deal of fun -- John Self A flashing kaleidoscope of a novel ... Michael Hofmann's translation has a vivid immediacy * Country & Town House * Brutal and prophetic ... a turning point in the history of the German novel * The Times * Berlin Alexanderplatz, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, still fascinates as a cautionary tale by shining light on the most obscure parts of the human soul. -- Tobias Grey * Wall Street Journal *