ŷ������

A superb novel of the city, in which the clangour and grinding tumult of modernity are mocked as trivialities over which dooming history and imminent catastrophe will prevail, a place where things are so desperately hopeless that even the weather is marshalled against the grotesque futility of human life, where madness, self-harm, depravity and obscene levels of duplicity are amongst countless other routine afflictions, and where our antihero Franz Biberkopf continually invites accelerated self-immolation, perhaps literature's ultimate masochist. Forget any ideas about this being 'difficult', other than regarding its nastiness and confrontational level-headedness. It eventually becomes a supreme and extremely readable study in mendacity, pointlessness, the fleeting nature of love, how violence and narcissism are necessary bedfellows and how cities harvest derangement, amongst about a thousand other things.

PS shout-out to David Brunelle whose concurrent readalong observations hugely aided my appreciation of the book and its themes.


'Some women and girls are walking across Alexanderstrasse and the square, each carrying a fetus in her belly, protected by law. It is hot, and the women and girls are sweating outside, but the fetus within sits quietly in his corner, the temperature is just right for him as he walks across the Alexanderplatz, but many a fetus will fare badly later on: he’d better not laugh too soon.

Others are running about trying to hook whatever they can; some have their bowels full and others are wondering how to get them filled. Hahn’s department store is entirely wrecked, all the other houses are full of shops, but they only look like shops, as a matter of fact, there are nothing but calls, just decoy calls, twittering bird-notes, crickle-crackle, a chirping without words.

So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead.

The dead I praised. To everything a season; a time to rend, and a time to sew, a time to keep, and a time to cast away. I praised the dead who lie sleeping beneath the trees.'