Two Women And A Poisoning

Description

What would it take for a woman to poison her husband? Young couple Elli and Link have been married for a year when Elli meets Gretchen, and the two soon become friends. When Elli confides in her friend about the abuse she suffers at her husband's hands, they hatch a plan for Elli to escape. But when their efforts prove unsuccessful, the pair begin to discuss a more permanent solution to Elli's problem: poison. Based on a famous murder trial which took place in Berlin in 1923, this short novel by the master of German modernism, Alfred Doeblin, explores questions of moral culpability and societal expectations which remain as relevant today as in the 1920s.

Alfred Doeblin (1878-1957) was a German novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was also a doctor, practising psychiatry in working-class Berlin, the setting of both his most famous novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his true-crime tale Two Women and a Poisoning. In 1933, Doeblin was forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish origins and lived in France and the USA for the duration of the war.

'A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses.' * New Yorker on Berlin Alexanderplatz * '[An] immense and splendidly gritty novel...funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled.' * Paris Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'Doeblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind...One of the great anti-war novels of our time.' * Australian Book Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'I learned more about the essence of the epic from Doeblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.' * Bertolt Brecht on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'As gripping today as it was when published in 1924.' * Australian Women's Weekly * 'For the reader it is as frightening as it is perplexing, as Doeblin has leapt off a true event into an all-involving piece of art.' * Otago Daily Times * 'Two Women and a Poisoning-in Imogen Taylor's sensitive translation-has much to contribute to the current search for answers to the terrible question of what brings men-and occasionally women-to kill their intimate partners.' * Australian Book Review *