The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann.
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 *
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