Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

A hundred years ago there was a craze for giant plotless novels that tried to slice through an entire city or even country and look down at the thousands of humans milling around like badly dressed ants and itemise them all. These huge novels (Ulysses by Jimmy Joyce, U.S.A by Johnny Dos Passos, The Waste Land by Tommy Eliot - not a novel but the same kind of thing) use newspaper clippings, adverts, random dialogue, doggerel, children’s rhymes, radio announcements, political proclamations, Greek myths [they love those] and anything and everything to collage & mash together ALL OF MODERN LIFE in a frantic attempt to mirror the stressed-out psychological dissociativeness and allround bonkers quality of how we live NOW (multivalent) as opposed to how we lived THEN (linearly). This large and enormously impressive novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of those.

If you’re serious about literature you have to like this one, it’s an acknowledged masterpiece so get with the program, and I am impressed that many goodreaders proclaim their love for this massive stodge of tiresome detail, dull unattributed conversation and rancid behavior (the guy we are following, Franz Biberkopf, has just done a 4 year stretch for beating his girlfriend to death � an act described as “some stupid stuff�).

But as a serial abandoner of great literature, you may be assured that I could not finish it, so it got chucked on the pile that already contains The Man who Loved Children, Sentimental Education, The Naked and the Dead, The Adventures of Augie March and of course Miss Macintosh My Darling amongst many other lesser works.

Sometimes you come across stuff and you says to yourself � that there Mona Lisa is a great painting, I know that, it’s obvious enough, but she gets on my nerves, I don’t have to like it. So I do says that Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hell of a novel, probably a great novel, but I didn’t like it.

Note on Ulysses

This is not Alfred Doblin’s fault at all, but some of his fans say that this novel is like Ulysses when it really isn’t. It’s somewhat like the stream of consciousness sections of Ulysses, but they are a small part of Ulysses. But even then, Mr Doblin doesn’t really do much stream of consciousness either, he does stream of conversation. Perhaps more accurately described as stream of inane blathering.