The dish

I’m still not sure if I liked Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I did not enjoy the process of reading it: It is slow, disjointed, and frequently aimless. Döblin uses a weird stream-of-consciousness style that almost seems to be an attempt to represent the inner thoughts of a borderline lunatic, even though Franz Biberkopf, his main character, isn’t so much crazy as unintelligent. He bounces from dialogue to thoughts to poetry and song lyrics to text from advertisements seen on posters and in newspapers. The book is written in the third person, but the majority of the prose is spent in Franz’s head, making it thoroughly confusing when Döblin switches to the internal monologue of another character. And on top of all that, the plot is relatively thin on action, with the pace only quickening in the final two chapters (of nine). So if the question is whether I enjoyed reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, I’d have to say no.

At the same time, I can understand why the book is consistently ranked among the greatest novels ever written, including #70 on the Novel 100 and an appearance in the Bloomsbury 100 as well (more on that list in a moment). It is a novel of ideas, or more specifically a novel of an idea, that of the increasing sense of alienation brought about by rapid urbanization and industrial development. The more that we are surrounded by people, the more we are alone. Yet we can not survive or thrive alone, and solving this conflict is key to the redemption of Biberkopf towards the novel’s end. I can also see why literary critics would heap praise on the book’s writing style, which is thoroughly modern and clever and draws from one of the century’s most exalted works, Joyce’s Ulysses. (Apparently Döblin rewrote Berlin from scratch after reading Joyce’s magnum opus.)

Berlin tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a ne’er-do-well just released from Tegel prison, where he’d served four years for beating his girlfriend to death in a drunken rage, back into Berlin in the 1920s. The city, which is the second-most important character in the book, is changing rapidly, urbanizing and industrializing, facing social upheaval between communist and fascist movements, suffering an apparent decline in morality, and isolating its residents from each other and from society as a whole. Biberkopf says he wants to live righteously, but ends up falling in with the wrong people and making some stupendously bad choices, getting tied up in murder and racketeering, all the while blaming Fate for what’s happened.

Up until the final 30-40 pages, Franz’s refusal to take any responsibility for his actions, which among other things cause the death of someone close to him, drove me insane, particularly because the narrator appears to agree with Franz’s point of view. Franz’s redemption is incomplete and deliberately ambiguous, but it requires Franz to face up to who he is, the choices he’s made, and the need to adapt his approach to life to the changing environment of Berlin. If you can tough your way through the prose and are willing to ignore the allusions you missed (as I did, although I found myself wishing for an annotated text), there’s some payoff at the end both in terms of plot and the novel’s philosophical aims.

Next up is a nonfiction book I’m already mostly through, John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus, an entertaining if somewhat macabre read. I admit it might be more entertaining because of the macabre material, though.

—

Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides: 100 Must-Read Classic Novels is yet another list of 100 novels (actually, 99 novels and one collection of short stories), with a strong emphasis on the classics. This one comes with a short essay on each entry, and each ends with short lists of similar books to read if you liked the one covered in that essay. The author/editor, Nick Rennison, limited himself to books published by 1950, and cast a fairly wide net, including a number of books with which I wasn’t familiar (such as Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness’ Independent People, currently on my to-be-read shelf) and mixing in a P.G. Wodehouse book to balance out all the depressing books on the list. Rennison does have one strong bias towards English authors, who account for 42 of the books on the list, 46 if we include the two Scottish authors on the list as well as Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland but moved to London in his early 20s and wrote in English. I was dismayed at the omission of The Master and Margarita, which is mentioned in at least one of the recommendation lists, but pleased to see that some of the overlong “classic” novels of early English literature, like Pamela and Clarissa, the latter of which runs to over a million words or roughly 3300 pages of normal text, weren’t included.