Kyle's Updates en-US Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:19:17 -0700 60 Kyle's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9243682560 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:19:17 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle wants to read 'Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6']]> /review/show/7443279015 Time Regained by Marcel Proust Kyle wants to read Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6 by Marcel Proust
]]> Rating767359284 Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:36:44 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle liked a review]]> /
Kyle liked John's review of A People Betrayed (November 1918, #2):
A People Betrayed by Alfred Döblin
"Alfred Döblin: Spiritual Modernist
Alfred Döblin’s �1918 novels� about the German revolution (abridged and translated by John E. Woods in two volumes: A People Betrayed and Karl and Rosa 1948-51 and (the original volume 1) Citizens and Soldiers by Chris Godwin) are political novels interleaved with Christian themes of faith, redemption, grace. More long-standing themes in Döblin’s work are also found in these novels ‘concern with materialism and rationalism, Döblin also relating these themes, however, to underline the bitter results of the faithlessness of 20th century society. To an extent these themes associate him with the ‘spiritual� modernism of T.S. Eliot or, perhaps, John Cowper Powys.
The 1918 novels, published post-second world war but started in that war, coincide with Döblin’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and a comparison with, his near contemporary, the Roman Catholic writer Graham Greene inevitably comes to mind. Greene, however, was ‘late to the scene� of modernism and soon abandoned it after his early novels like England Made Me. Greene’s early foray into modernism was essentially limited to a few stylistic tropes such as coincident narrative timelines, and his maturity as a ‘writer of faith� came after abandoning modernism. In contrast, the style of Döblin’s 1918 novels continues with the mature modernism of his Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) whilst still able to address in a Christian spiritual manner themes like the domination of science and rationalization marking the modern megalopolis: out-of-human-control-mechanized technology, mass communication, and the mass slaughter of the trenches.
Döblin’s religious concerns mark the 1918 novels, particularly as they revolve around the major character in the novel, Lieutenant Friedrich Becker (it might be argued he is the only fully developed, ‘rounded�, character, at least in terms of usual understandings of character in conventional novels. However, Döblin rejected conventional characterization, a point of view seen in his essay ‘Remarks on the Novel�. Döblin’s characters are generally, but consciously, ‘flat�) In Karl and Rosa we find Becker recovering from his war wounds and returning to teaching the classics at a boy’s gymnasium. Due to his classics-background, as well as his convoluted (but inevitable) reproachment with Christianity, Becker is a symbolic figure allowing Döblin to address the faithlessness in the social and political roots of war and its immediate, revolutionary, aftermath.
Earlier, in volume 1 of Wood’s and Godwin’s translation we find Becker in hospital but soon to be repatriated with the hospital itself when Alsace was ceded to France. Back in Berlin, his friend Maus, also a veteran and thus a parallel figure (they both fall in love with the same nurse, Hilde, at the hospital) soon gets drawn into the German revolution of November 1918. Becker hasn’t the temperament for revolutionary politics and will not be lured in by Maus, a character more easily led by ideology, even if he was in any physical shape to become involved.
In Karl and Rosa we see him in recovery, at least in terms of regaining mobility, and he eventually returns to teaching. But, ironically, he finds that his pre-war pedagogic interpretation of classical Greek tragedy seems no longer relevant to his pupils. Most of the students have become cynical in the face of being on the losing side of the war - they represent a new generation, forced into a radical break, with the values of pre-war Bismarckian aristocratic-paternal German culture. Döblin shows how this pervasive sense of post-war trauma and alienation puts Becker’s ethical concerns with Sophoclean themes of redemption and conciliation into eclipse. Becker believes the ethical concerns of the classics can offer a source of post-war solace, but to the boys these ideas seem far too distant, abstract, perhaps too imbued with an ancient sense of faithfulness, and fall on their death ears.
Intermittently, Becker is shown to be visited by symbolic figures who tempt him towards suicide. To explain these as ‘hallucination� is probably not right because in Döblin’s work from 1912 onwards it is not unusual to find characters engaging with ‘spirits� which, however, have no lack of material presence. We cannot explain this away, either, that Becker is suffering from ‘shell shock� - now PTSD � because that would be to rationalize his state of mind which would also go against the grain of Döblin’s spiritual modernism. These symbolic figures are stand-ins for the Devil and attempt to lure Becker to deep despair and suicide. He is, however, also ministered to by the figure of the medieval mystic and priest Johannes Tauber who consoles him with Christian tenets of redemption - hope, faith and grace. Döblin has Becker emerging from these Christian debates finding a sense of purpose which he links to the theme of redemption in Antigone. At the same time, we see Becker becoming involved in defending the disgraced gymnasium director whose platonic relationship with the student Heinz is misinterpreted by students and staff as paedophilic. Becker gets drawn deep into the controversy after the director is killed by Heinz’s father and he falls under the scandalized gaze of students, staff and the mass media of the Berlin press.
All around Becker’s story Döblin, in an historically ‘epic� and detailed (the tight narrative time-span and detail is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel cycle � although Döblin escapes Solzhenitsyn’s somewhat pedestrian style) story traces the revolutionary six months from November 1918. It is a story of machinations of the right: army staff, aristocrats, bourgeois, bureaucrats, the interim liberal government. In opposition are the forces of the left: revolutionary (Kiel) sections of the navy as well as communists and Sparticists. The compressed but finely detailed historical narrative is, however, jumpy, chaotic - Döblin’s modernism appropriate to reflecting the temper of the times, cinematic, shifting from location to location across Germany (and the Atlantic in the scenes covering Woodrow Wilson’s voyage to Europe.) Groups of key characters (i.e. Egbert, Eisner, Schleicher, Groener, Liebknecht, Radek, Luxemburg) as well as tens of other more minor historical figures from the period are shown vying for political power. Döblin’s modernism ensures that the reader’s attention is deliberately scattered, fragmentary, the writing and structure conveying an overall sense of the chaos of revolution: of shifting values, of liberalism, socialism, communism and Bismarckism not simply at odds with one another but internally fractured by internal suspicion and disorganization as well. Durkheim might have said (he died in November 1917) German society was at the time dangerously anomic - but in terms of Döblin’s spiritual modernism it is a state and society riven by faithlessness and soullessness.


Continuities: Spirits, symbiosis, rebellious bodies
The Christian themes that appear in the 1918 novels, as well as Döblin’s modernism appear in other forms in his earlier novels and stories. In his early stories (The Murder of a Buttercup (1912) such as ‘Bluebeard the Knight� we find in the character Ilsebill who exhibits contrasting but similarly motivated spiritual beliefs in paganism and Christianity:
[P]raying at one tree, hanging her cross upon it and from the tree came a fire, fire smoke, smelling sweeter than lilacs.
Döblin’s ‘pre-Christian� spiritual modernism figures in the ghost of the drowned lover in the story ‘The sailboat ride�. A more sceptical side of spiritualism is seen in Döblin’s 1945 story ‘Traffic with the beyond�. But before that, in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) we find Biberkopf overseen by Sarug and Terah, ‘guardian angels� who chat together about his fate and character. They choose not to intervene and are actually damning because although Biberkopf, admittedly no intellectual, endures, lives through much experience he lacks ‘grace� and is tragically too easily inclined:
…towards mere knowledge, and then � towards escape, and death. He is no longer interested. He has passed along the road of experience and grown weary. His journey has outwearied body and soul. (345)
In this novel, also, we find the wheeler-dealer Meck (‘business is the best thing�, 49) suggesting that Germany itself is belaboured by ‘something on its conscience� (54). The recurring images Döblin evokes in the slaughterhouse sections of Berlin Alexanderplatz reverberate with the deeply primal state of German post-war guilt and social trauma. This is also felt in the precariousness of narrative voice and the symbiotic manner in which Biberkopf goes from pillar to post. Biberkopf’s life is ruined by his unwilling (but resistless) involvement with gangsters, in particular with his spiteful animus Rheinhold. The latter may represent, a ‘cold force of life�, but Biberkopf is one amongst thieves and, symbiotically, implicated in his girlfriend’s Sonia’s death.

The idea of symbiosis is important in Döblin. Even in his early essay (1913) ‘To novelists and their critics� Döblin writes of the need for the modern novelist to reject romantic-rationalised concepts of human behaviour for more ‘concrete� or natural ones:
Rationalism was always the death of Art; nowadays the most importunate and cosseted rationalism is called psychology. Many a so-called “fine� novel or novella � the same goes for the drama � consists almost entirely of analyses of the characters� trains of thought: conflicts arise in these trains of thought, leading to paltry or concocted “plots�. Maybe such trains of thought do occur, but not so isolated; in themselves they say nothing, cannot be represented: an amputated arm, breath without the breathing person, glances without eyes. Real motives come from quite another place; these, lacking a living totality, are humbug, aesthetic froth: a bored doctrinaire author bereft of ideas blathering to educated people desirous of instruction. (Essays-on-Literature-and-Autobiography.pdf (beyond-alexanderplatz.com) accessed 17/11/2023)

In the early articulation of his modernism, ‘To Novelists and Their Critics� (1913), Döblin called for a ‘cinematic� prose style in order to give a sense of concurrency, not just of events but of states of consciousness, or of a ‘sequence of complexes�. In Two Women and a Poisoning (1924) Döblin formulates a ‘symbiotic� analysis of how instinctual drives are equal if not more important than psychological motives or ‘inclinations� when describing why characters act in a novel or, more generally, when analysing human behaviour:
If we want to examine closely the way we act, we would do well to turn our attention to unorganized matter and the general forces of nature (121).
In the ‘Afterword� to this intriguing hybrid documentary-novel (appearing almost forty years before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), Döblin posits a literary modernist spin on symbiosis: to see characters reacting to one another (and their environment) rather than them each following their ego-individual orbits or psychological-motivations. Döblin prefigures here the aesthetic aims of Berlin Alexanderplatz by also arguing in Two Women that ‘disorder is knowledge� (119). By 1929 symbiosis becomes a key aspect of this novel in which Franz Biberkopf (interestingly, given the above quote, missing an arm) effectively bounces-off or into one character’s orbit and another’s - going from pillar to post.
Another, stylistic, aspect of symbiosis the regular attributing of volatility in characters� behaviour - their somewhat ‘jumpy� motility. In the early (1914) novel Wadek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine, a comically wildly inchoate story with a fragmentary, sometimes bewildering, narrative, we find a bunch of madcap and conflicting materialists and rationalists in chain-reaction. Characters typically ‘thrust� and ‘Shriek� or ‘ricochet� off one-another. This characteristic is also found, less regularly, in A People Betrayed where many characters are depicted as being in states of hyperactivity, they ‘leap� about (32), they don’t visit but ‘disturb� one another (44).
From the time of the early stories we find descriptions of bodies exhibiting, also, a certain ‘independence of action� whilst in appearance they seem somewhat surreal and cubist (perhaps Döblin was influenced by contemporary developments in artistic representation.) Characters� bodies are described as contorted and hollowed-out reminiscent of Henry Moore� sculptures. Wadek’s wife has a ‘chest tightly compressed � a bit like the kicks in a tyre�, she is ‘a deformed heap of flesh�, her body’s geometry unruly:
Her head fell forward into its hollow between the breasts, so that her jowls pushed the two flabby bulges out of shape.
Similar images of contorted bodies appear in Berlin Alexanderplatz:
The girl daintily, then serpentines along the wall, and, dangling her buttocks, slithers sweetly across to Willy.
A man’s moustache is described as bending:
At a table sat two couples looking at the passers-by. The gentleman in the salt and pepper suit, his moustache bent over the prominent bosom of a dark, stout woman. (67)
The distinctive narrative voice in this novel is characterized by a somewhat soi-distant narrator, multifarious, difficult to pin down, dynamic and in its own right symbiotic. At times it is straightforwardly omniscient, but then by turns it is also an unnamed character, an onlooker or caught up in the events it depicts. Sometimes, also, it is the voice of Franz, or perhaps his voice being mimicked by the narrator:
Now it’s going to start, the four of them want to get me�(79)
In the episode in this novel of the ‘bald pate� paedophile, we also find a manipulative voice characteristic of 1920s advertising and promotion interjecting itself:
Inverts: after many years of experiment I have at last found a radical antidote against the growth of the beard. Every part of the body can be depilated. Furthermore I have discovered the means of developing a truly feminine breast within an astonishingly short time. No medicines, absolutely safe and harmless. As proof: myself. (64)
The dynamism of narrative voice in Berlin Alexanderplatz even exhibits insecurity about the status of pronomination itself:
Pigs, oxen, calves � they are slaughtered. There is no reason why we should concern ourselves with them. Where are we? We? (195)

In his early story, The Death of a Buttercup, Döblin describes the entirely self-absorbed Fischer as being positioned by what might seem like the scenery � by nature: ‘The trees strode quickly past him�. This somewhat odd grammatical construction has the effect of endowing nature with agency and reversing the reader’s conventional assumptions of humans as subjects of sentences or primary agents acting on the natural environment. Fischer also exhibits what will become a regular trope in Döblin - a recalcitrant body, a body that seems to have a somewhat independent and unsettling mien:
One foot stepped ahead of the other, arms swung from his shoulders. […] This [buttercup] called to his eye, his hand, his stick. (52)
In Wadek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine, a novel contemporary with this early story, we find the industrialist Rommel watching his fist acting independently of him (228). And in ‘The ballerina and the body�, the ballerina’s body has being beyond our usual sense of it as secondary to self: we see it recalcitrant, obdurate to the dancer’s will. The body, in effect, has its own spirit, a view of corporality that phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty were developing at the same time as Döblin. This theme continues as late as Karl and Rosa where we still find nature, the material of technology, rearing up in rebellious technologies (coinciding with Döblin’s 1945 story, ‘Materialism, a fable�) such as bullets and guns having ‘preferences� (121-4), ‘automatic weapons, which, angry at not being used, discharged themselves� (365).

Conclusion
Like other spiritual modernists such as T.S. Eliot, the late novels of Döblin pit the eternal, faith and spirit against worldly transitory ideals of rationality, state and party. There are summary statements of this in the 1918 novels, like in this from the mouth of the aristocrat Baron Wylinski where both sides of the dynamic, faith and society, are in play:
‘If one understands the world as a totality,� he explained to Motz, ‘as a sensual and existential context affecting each individual soul, then one cannot help but view it as a religious concept. The soul remains independent, apart from it, retaining a sense of its own value. But man has long attempted to build bridges across that gulf. And indeed the state as an organized, collective power has found its place at that juncture and is more than merely a negative concept.� (A People Betrayed 431)
The 1918 novels are monuments to Döblin’s more particularly Christian reaction to 20th century politics � seen in the extensive depictions of political mechanization of Egbert, the army hierarchy, the police, the Sparticists and the communists, and the representative figures of delusional misplaced-idealists in Liebknecht and Luxemburg. There was an inevitable tincture of reactionism in Döblin’s post-war conversion to Christianity but, thankfully, this didn’t lead to the sort of espousal of organized right-wing reactionary groups, like Eliot’s with Maurras� Action Francaise. But Döblin’s long-standing concern with human spirituality was a key aspect to his foregoing of the depleted genres of 19th century realist literature and to his becoming one of the key figures in the formation of modernism in the early 20th century.
References
Döblin, Alfred (1931) Alexanderplatz (translated Eugene Jolas) Martin Secker.
Döblin, Alfred (1983) A People Betrayed (translated John E Woods) Fromm International
Döblin, Alfred (1983) Karl and Rosa (translated John E Woods) Fromm International
Döblin, Alfred (2016) Bright Magic NYRB
Döblin, Alfred (2021) Two Women and a Poisoning Text
Döblin, Alfred (2020) Wadek and his Struggle Against the Steam Turbine (translated Anne Thompson) Independently published.
Other texts referred to, particularly volume 1 of the 1918 novels, Citizens and Soldiers and Döblin’s journalism and criticism, all translated by Chris Godwin, can be accessed on the creative commons at Chris Godwin’s site: Beyond Alexanderplatz (beyond-alexanderplatz.com)

"
]]> Review3461231992 Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:27:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle added 'Manas. Epische Dichtung']]> /review/show/3461231992 Manas. Epische Dichtung by Alfred Döblin Kyle gave 4 stars to Manas. Epische Dichtung (Paperback) by Alfred Döblin
"There was no more rain.
Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down
From the eastern iceheads of Himalaya,
Blew them into mountains and cedar forests
Onto blooming meadows, southerly slopes,
This bedlam of beasts and trees -
Euphorbia acacia stands of bamboo -
Tossed them, torrents and ice-needles,
Over sheer rockwalls, seething hills and spates,
Over rivers, -
They raced thundering down deep valleys,
Kosi, Alaknanda, Yamuna,
Surged onto the radiant plains of India! -
Storms shredded the black clouds away,
Howled."

Manas is at first glance a bit of a difficult epic of Döblins to classify.

Clocking in at a 13,000 line epic poem about a Hindu god attempting to achieve full consciousness, it serves as a transitional piece to Berlin Alexanderplatz where he is concentrating on the individual and is a further exploration of the lyrical style he explored in Mountains Oceans Giants, but metamorphosing into an actual poetic verse form. Manas is an existential piece as well.

Döblin uses the Field of the Dead as an exploration of his depression in the mid to late 1920's owing to the failed reception of his early BA works and there are punctuation less, comma less verse lines in various parts of the poem.

Savitri acts as a stand in for Döblin's mistress in the 1920's, the photographer Charlotte Niclas, and Manas's rebirth through the love of Savitri is almost a prelude to Döblin's successful breakthrough in his writing career with BA.

It's filled with repetition, and it courts comparisons to the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In many ways, the existential struggle for the soul and spirit of Manas seems to foreshadow Franz Biberkopf's spiritual struggle in the closing parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Reading the poem can be a difficult but richly rewarding experience for those trying to find clues to Döblin's stylistic development up to Berlin Alexanderplatz.

"He is not extinguished. Not extinguished.
Manas is not extinguished." ]]> Review3461212245 Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:26:43 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle added 'Wallenstein. Roman.']]> /review/show/3461212245 Wallenstein. Roman. by Alfred Döblin Kyle gave 5 stars to Wallenstein. Roman. (Paperback) by Alfred Döblin
Wallenstein is the most difficult epic of Döblin's to read and probably his most important after Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Wallenstein has been seen as an epic about war, history, and power taking as it's primary material the events of the Thirty Years War.

It's almost a forerunner of Pynchon.

A following passage from Chris Godwin's unpublished translation from his website Beyond Alexanderplatz shows the overwhelming effect of Döblin's style:

"There lay Vienna, in its ring of walls moats bastions; houses, towers, churches cheek by jowl with houses markets alleys, spilling out towards the Danube, bearing stonily down across the Werd, questing fingers reaching towards the Venetian Strand, the Rustschacher park, the two broad Galizin Meadows. Streets filled with artisans, squares thronged with hagglers market-booths riders sedan-chairs tomtoms theriac-peddlers. Beadles calling behind shaved
miscreants, necks in the heavy stone collar of shame. Bath attendants blaring little horns, banging on Turkish basins. Nuns swarmed from convents, black and white, shod unshod, stepped lisping rosary-twiddling into churches, naves redolent with incense, beneath depictions of brutal torture, fervour and ecstasy. Acrobats and lusty harlots crossed their path, enticing into wooden booths on the New Market. Soldiers from the Emperor’s wars who had fought against Bethlen Gabor, had torn the Bohemians to shreds at White Mountain, plumes bobbing rakishly between shoulders or down over brow and mouth, gaudy scarves, high thigh-boots splaying wide, spilling gaudy fabric. Cossacks with broad dirty faces, long blue coats, tall lambskin hats; their little eyes blinked lustfully, they cooed at women in pearl-stitched skirts and blouses. Elegant pages tripped along in tight hose decorated with coquettish bows; young women of the town, hair parted in the middle or swelling down over neck and ears, nestling under bonnets, caught in coral neck-bands, green camisole, loose pale blouse, or in short skirts with high Hungarian boots. Fashionable cavaliers, cronies in gambling fighting boozing, felt hat with curled brim, Walloon riding-cape wide on the shoulders, storming down steep alleys on horseback pursued by large dogs, obsequious hosts at hostelry doors. A dead man between boards, borne by corpse-brethren out to the cemetery in the Withies. Blind men in the Hohe Markt, eyes put out for coining, perjurers lacking a hand, men lacking tongue nose ears in groups outside the churches, rattling their bowls and tin cups. Students with dagger and bandolier at their hostel the Lampel-hall, Rose-hall, or walking earnestly along looking for fun at the expense of some apprentice-boy. A swell on horseback, jewelled hand behind the back, draped in English cloth, attended by a mounted retinue. Swishing down a sun-baked alley in his purple cassock, a bishop, skullcap on the tonsured head, girdle trailing him from a doorway. City guards dragged halberds through the dust and muck, planted themselves at wells, played dice, looked for a quiet spot. In houses dives cellars a mingled throng of raucous silent sickly people, householders stewards cellarmen kitchen-lads sweeps cutlers goldsmiths tailors tinsmiths calendar-makers brewers� apprentices vagrant youths merchants clerks candlemakers huckster-women, widows on the lookout for a catch, dragoons averse to service, rogues who found life in a blind alley to their liking, peasant-bilking cattle-dealers,
parchment-makers leather-workers hide-dealers knife-grinders pimps in neck-irons, swift
gaunt Jews, advocates middlemen crying infants in sand, itinerant booksellers from Saxony Bohemia with illustrated pamphlets in trays hung around the neck."

A passage in the first book written shortly after the 1918 Spanish Flu almost seems to be an eerie prescient description of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The pestilential stink that streamed to him revealed their location. A fever had broken out in the camp near Beidhaus; spread like wildfire by billet-finders foragers rangers freebooters across woods and hills, it rippled through peasants and cavalrymen, armoured cuirassiers, musketeers.
Midges and mosquitoes swarmed up from ponds. Just beneath the reed-choked mirror-surface of the water hung millions of larvae, ownerless litter discarded by Nature, calmly
sucking air through the little breathing-tube. Heads swelled, lifted above the mirror, carapaces shivered, cracked, stretched, tore sideways from the head down; slowly the long juvenile
thrust its way out, antennae limbs wings tight against the torso, rested spreading itself on a leaf of duckweed, hung wing-stretching long-legged on a reedy scabbard. They rose humming into the twilight, veined the air with chirping, their thin high song. Jostling humming flies with ringed darting bodies, long proboscis projecting between whisper-thin antennae stiff as a spear from the little head in front of the clunky thorax. Bore itself a thousandfold, tenthousandfold, millionfold through the evening air on little glassy wings. Lighted on a mouth, a forehead, a hand breaking bread, on a throat, between the trim beard of cornet or captain and his Venetian collar.

If a man jumping from his horse in a sweat tore off his jacket to allow cool air against his damp chest, the little flying creature clung unseen to his hot skin, sucked its little drop of
blood, injecting as it did so a little drop of poison. Now the soldier can go hunting, hang
people from door-beams and wells, drive livestock, lead a high old life � and all the while the fever courses through his body night after night, turns his blood into a tropical swamp. Let the cornet roar, gulp this year’s sour wine from a jug, sail menacing on his steed at the head of a hundred men through silent chimney-smoking villages, papers tucked around the throat for protection, plump-cheeked and hot on his overfed mount: in his knees is a vibration, the collar must be loosened, no strength in the calves, rainbows shimmer before the eyes; the freezing and teeth-chattering begin, at night the man lies in hay, in a bed, swears hoarsely as if it is nothing, and day by day grows weaker, more spectral from one excursion to the next. And it fell as much upon the highest, the pikemen, as on whores and their enforcers. Not many died of the fever. Those it attacked grew weak, raged worse than before. Those who died rotted where they fell. Men moved among each other jaundiced, grinned feebly in the heat. Until the stink spread. At first in the camp near Beidhaus, then in Weiden, in Kohlberg Market, people appeared with a new kind of ailment. Distraught plague-barbers told of peasants who had a new sickness in their beds. Lice assailed the army. They multiplied on the mercenaries in their pillaged jackets linens palliasses pelts saddle-cloths, dropped them dead in muddy woods and lanes, made welts in the skin, dry or weeping; in many the beastly venom sank deep into the veins. They began to talk feverish nonsense, some raved, lumps as big as peas erupted on the bitten skin, flecks of blood spurted horribly; sleepy and numb they dropped where they had fled, shunned by others, quarantined, starved. Learned pupils of Paracelsus spoke of the mercurial-sulphurous signal of the disease, or the mercurial-saline, of the fever-hunger, disorders of the urine, watery oedemas in the legs, spitting of blood,
turgescence of the chest, melancholy."

The novel is richly cinematic in its descriptions, and also incredibly violent and disturbing at the same time. Wallenstein is the title of the novel but the real figure is Ferdinand. Döblin in Wallenstein is attempting to show the futility of War and the parallels between the Thirty Years War and World War I. ]]> Review3461231992 Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:16:03 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle added 'Manas. Epische Dichtung']]> /review/show/3461231992 Manas. Epische Dichtung by Alfred Döblin Kyle gave 4 stars to Manas. Epische Dichtung (Paperback) by Alfred Döblin
"There was no more rain.
Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down
From the eastern iceheads of Himalaya,
Blew them into mountains and cedar forests
Onto blooming meadows, southerly slopes,
This bedlam of beasts and trees -
Euphorbia acacia stands of bamboo -
Tossed them, torrents and ice-needles,
Over sheer rockwalls, seething hills and spates,
Over rivers, -
They raced thundering down deep valleys,
Kosi, Alaknanda, Yamuna,
Surged onto the radiant plains of India! -
Storms shredded the black clouds away,
Howled."

Manas is at first glance a bit of a difficult epic of Döblins to classify.

Clocking in at a 13,000 line epic poem about a Hindu god attempting to achieve full consciousness, it serves as a transitional piece to Berlin Alexanderplatz where he is concentrating on the individual and is a further exploration of the lyrical style he explored in Mountains Oceans Giants, but metamorphosing into an actual poetic verse form. Manas is an existential piece as well.

Döblin uses the Field of the Dead as an exploration of his depression in the mid to late 1920's owing to the failed reception of his early BA works and there are punctuation less, comma less verse lines in various parts of the poem.

Savitri acts as a stand in for Döblin's mistress in the 1920's, the photographer Charlotte Niclas, and Manas's rebirth through the love of Savitri is almost a prelude to Döblin's successful breakthrough in his writing career with BA.

It's filled with repetition, and it courts comparisons to the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In many ways, the existential struggle for the soul and spirit of Manas seems to foreshadow Franz Biberkopf's spiritual struggle in the closing parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Reading the poem can be a difficult but richly rewarding experience for those trying to find clues to Döblin's stylistic development up to Berlin Alexanderplatz.

"He is not extinguished. Not extinguished.
Manas is not extinguished." ]]> Rating738872648 Sun, 16 Jun 2024 06:47:22 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle liked a review]]> /
Kyle liked Chad's review of Ishmael, A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism:
Ishmael, A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism by James Baird
"The objective of literary criticism, according to the author, is "to establish the facts of what [the work] meant to its maker." With this goal in mind, Baird absorbs himself with his pet theory of "autotypes" (a strange way of describing impressive first-hand experiences), essentially reducing literary criticism to a mixture of biography and psychoanalysis. While I thoroughly reject his premise, he has done an admirable job of cataloguing many of the thematic and symbolic concerns of the "modern primitivism" movement, with an especial focus on Herman Melville.

He also makes the claim that "an ultimate objective of criticism should be the arrangement of works of art comparatively, so that art may comment upon art." Accordingly, he takes ample opportunity to cite a large body of literary works, many of which were obscure to me, and which consequently provoked disorientation, titillation, and illumination in about equal measure. More interesting (to me) would be for the literary critic to aspire to create a work of art, so that his "art may comment upon art." Perhaps something like Beachy-Quick's Whaler's Dictionary comes close.

Furthermore, not all of his analysis seems foolproof. I found it implausible that Baird equated Jack Chase (Melville's real-life friend, as depicted in White-Jacket) with both Billy Budd and Rolfe (two fictional characters without much resemblance to Chase or each other). At other times he lent an unusual emphasis on certain symbols in Melville's works (e.g., lizards) while neglecting more prominent ones (e.g., sharks).

Despite these criticisms, Ishmael has the capability to challenge and inspire a deeper reading of Melville and other so-called "modern primitivists," including Conrad, Gaugin, Leconte de Lisle, etc."
]]> Review5021882263 Thu, 09 May 2024 14:36:39 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle added 'The Land Without Death: The Amazonas Trilogy']]> /review/show/5021882263 The Land Without Death by Alfred Döblin Kyle gave 5 stars to The Land Without Death: The Amazonas Trilogy (Paperback) by Alfred Döblin
The Land Without Death (the Amazonas Trilogy) is the last great masterpiece to come from Alfred Döblin's pen before his conversion to Catholicism in 1941. Döblin is at his most profound, creative and inspiring in his writings in the 1920s and 1930s before his conversion (in my opinion) ruined the interpretive ambiguity of his best writings and turned a large portion of his work from the 1940s to 1957 into overtly religious polemic.

That aside, it is a powerful magical realist post colonial critique of the colonization of South America with the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon under the Conquistadors serving as an allegory for the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust. It courts comparisons with the best of Joseph Conrad and Jorge Luis Borges.

Döblin's philosophy of nature in the novel anticipates modern day environmental philosophy and concerns with the legacy of the Spanish Conquest and the brutality inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It shares a strong kinship and overlap in thematic concern with Mountains Oceans Giants, his 1924 climate fiction epic, which is also very much concerned with Nature and the Anthropocene, with much of the philosophy owing a debt to the Naturphilosophie of German Romanticism and I personally detect an added debt to the pastoral tradition.

Döblin again shows the tension between Nature and the Promethean hubris of Humanity in attempting to exert power and control over the environment rather than attempting to coexist peacefully with it.

A lyrical passage on Page 544 of the present edition from the novel serves as a tour de force example of its prose:

"The Amazon, that flowing sea, those old, young, measureless rolling waters! How it pours down from the rocky wall of the Andes, quitting the icy horror of the peaks and plateaus down into its plain and eastward. Earth-shatterer, Earth-builder, it carries sediments in such quantity that they are borne along all the way to the ocean, there it lays down sandbanks, plugs the coastal waters between Caviana and Cabo Norte so full that they silt up entirely, and to the south, where it debouches, banks form along the coast, islands grow, the sea assaults them, the sea into whose jaws the river tirelessly pours its white water, sand, mud, floating grass, ubussi palms complete with fruit. And the sea shakes its fist, sends its tidal bore, the pororoca, up the valley, the sea builds itself into a wall, thunders onward, fills the rivermouths and rolls on upriver. But finally it must collapse and become stranded on the banks. All around the primal force of this river flowing over Earth’s ancient rocks, a forest has planted itself. The river does not leave untouched the land it has borne along. It penetrates it with a thousand rivers, rivulets, creeks, channels, lakes, soaks into the ground like placental veins in the body of a pregnant woman, there where the fruit grows. The river rolls for a while steady and assured in its deep bed, sends out mists as reminders to everything above that thinks itself secure. And then when the time of its swelling arrives, it invades the land that it has carried along. Fire has receded from the Earth, now the distant Sun must warm it. But the giant river, Amazonas, is not terrible and shrivelling like the hot Sun, through its mouth the Sun speaks to ancient Earth, it is the Sun’s proconsul. From the Sun it receives the snowmelt of the mountains, and enters intoxicated into its land and proclaims the power of the Sun, its king. This is the time of floods. The river worries away at its banks. It turns the land into a floating garden, scoops languid lakes into itself again, even forces back the rivers that contribute water to it, and colours their dark currents milky."

Though a work of imagination, Döblin seeks to humanize the native peoples especially in the first part, where they are shown as the uncivilized, one with nature. One wonders whether this idealism is escapist or authentic, but of primary concern is how strong and robust the translation is.

The translator Chris Godwin as he has done so in all of his Döblin translations mercifully unparagraphs and disentangles the dialogue in all of his translations going for a more traditional English typography and reader friendly layout unlike NYRB Classics who in their otherwise brilliant Berlin Alexanderplatz translation, stuck too closely to the original German typography, resulting in a confusing layout for the average reader.

Godwin captures Döblin's breadth and vast expanse of prose, with particular attention to the tonality of Döblin's language and style, a lyrical flood of the Amazon river overwhelming and spiralling into a vortex of thousands of words, a cadence of a million droplets of water.

Five stars. ]]> Rating725111238 Sun, 05 May 2024 10:31:42 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle liked a review]]> /
Kyle liked Chad's review of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities:
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities by Herman Melville
"With my apologies to Melville, my feelings toward this novel are "ambiguous."

This is a story about a boy who, in the name of Truth and Morality, becomes victim to his own illusions and cruelty. He refers to his mother as his sister, his sister as his wife, and his fiance as his cousin, with the readers left to draw the incestuous and pseudo-incestuous conclusions for themselves. This blending of relationships supplies much of the "ambiguity" of the subtitle, and impels the action like some hyper-tragic "Three's Company."

Melville's prose is frequently rich, rivaling the best of Moby-Dick. But the characters are amplified into an emotional pitch best described as melodrama, so unmodulated that it operates more by exhaustion than sympathy. And I concede that from weariness alone I may have failed to appreciate the subtler, maybe even parodic, aspects of the novel.

It is one thing to be taken by the narrator's stunning commentary: "it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind; for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike." But it is another thing to tolerate the so-afflicted protagonist, whose motivations are unhinged from any sense of direction.

Nor is Pierre the only character in a fugue. Isabella gives a surreal monologue recalling her breakthrough discovery that humans are distinct from snakes and lightning. It is just as weird as it sounds--spellbinding, even--(surpassed only by Pierre's hallucinations of a mountain) but for all its exceptionality, it typifies a cast of characters who, in one way or another, are paralyzed by strangely self-absorbed illusions of "ambiguity."

At one point, Pierre exclaims that "It is all a dream--we dream that we dreamed we dream." That theme owes more to Hamlet than Midsummer Night's Dream: for, aside from a notable satire on book publishers, the novel is (as far as I could tell) almost entirely devoid of Melville's characteristic humor. And the line evokes an apt but unfortunate comparison with the movie "Inception," which, in its striving for greater depths, merely begins to resemble a lazy imitation of itself."
]]> Review5784479931 Mon, 21 Aug 2023 07:01:29 -0700 <![CDATA[Kyle added 'Drama, Hörspiel, Film']]> /review/show/5784479931 Drama, Hörspiel, Film by Alfred Döblin Kyle gave 5 stars to Drama, Hörspiel, Film (Paperback) by Alfred Döblin
This review is of the play Die Ehe in the collection. So little is known about Alfred Döblin in the English speaking world that aspects of his body of work remain unknown even there is an incredible prescience and relevance to our current times.

Die Ehe is a remarkable leftist political play very much influenced by Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic theatre. It was premiered on November 29, 1930 in Munich and was banned two weeks after the premiere as Leftist propaganda.

What drew my attention to this play (untranslated from the German) is the first scene in which is presented a young married couple who still live with the woman's parents. Her husband - Karl but only referred to as "Man" in his role tells his wife - Guste, (also just called "Wife") that he has lost his job without knowing she is pregnant. In desperation about the poor economic situation and the emergency at hand, she turns to a doctor with a request for an abortion, who refuses this request for legal reasons. After being refused further help at a welfare agency and a chemist, she seeks out and has an unprofessional abortion performed on her by a shady alleyway doctor, and subsequently dies from the complications.

The second scene depicts a gardening family unable to find housing and let down by a poor welfare system.

The third scene shows a civil marriage of convenience which fails. An entrepreneur's daughter is urged on by her father to marry a man to take over his business. Problems arise later on with the husband feeling restricted by work and acquires a mistress. To avoid a scandal, and the help of a legal representative, the husband and wife find a solution with both swearing secrecy to the outside world.

Finally the characters from the first two scenes come on stage and turn to the audience together with an appeal for human unity.

I interpreted the play as being primarily a critique of the bourgeoisie and the institution of marriage in general and as a forerunner of activist and performance art.

Die Ehe being written and performed 43 years before Roe v. Wade was decided and with the decision by the Supreme Court to strike it down creates immense implications for this play in studying his work overall with its anticipation of social issues in today's world.

From the Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin:

"In fact, at the time he gave his speech on Arno Holz, Döblin himself was already at work on "Die Ehe" (Marriage; DHF 172�261), a piece of "political theater" whose theme anticipates Men without Mercy . The idea for a play critical of the bourgeois institution of marriage originated in the Gruppe 1925, and Erich Kleinschmidt has suggested that the project was also a response to the criticism Berlin Alexanderplatz had received from the Left. Of course, Döblin's hatred of the institution of bourgeois marriage goes all the way back to "Modern." The play is a piece of agitprop theater heavily influenced by Brecht's techniques of alienation: it makes use of a "Speaker" who directs the action and addresses the audience, of texts and pictures projected on a screen, and of songs and recitatives used to comment upon and alienate the action. It consists of three unrelated "scenes" devoted, respectively, to a young proletarian wife who dies during an illegal abortion forced upon her by poverty and unemployment; the family of an unemployed gardener, unable to find housing and torn apart by an inhumane welfare system; and a cynical marriage of convenience among the haute bourgeoisie .

Although "Marriage" was banned as Communist propaganda two weeks after its premiere in Munich in November 1930, there is more Marxism in Döblin's first story "Modern" than in the entire play. Its message is simply that money rules the world, and that the institutions of marriage and the family are callously undermined (among the proletariat) or cynically exploited (among the bourgeoisie) by capitalist society. The play is a curious mix of pathos in the first two scenes and heavy-handed satire in the third. In spite of all the techniques of Brechtian distancing and alienation, the Speaker unnecessarily belabors the villains of the piece (DHF 191) or falls into the pathos of righteous indignation (DHF 225), without in the end making clear what the point of the play is. The programmatic slogan "Know and Change!" is projected onto the screen at the beginning of the first scene (DHF 182), yet when the widower of the woman how dies having an abortion asks the pertinent question, "What should I do?", the Speaker's only answer is the doggerel "You've got to march along with the rest, my boy, nobody gets anything for free, first you've got to clench your fists, then slap the pavement with your shoes" (DHF 200), sung to the tune of a "saucy march." Klaus Müller-Salget has pointed out the superficial similarity to the march rhythms at the end of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but calls the verses in "Marriage" "nothing but a rhymed soap bubble."[17] Whether or not "Marriage" succeeds as a piece of political theater, it is an indication of Döblin's increasing interest in activist art, in an art able to reach a broad audience and to have some effect upon society. It is also important that the theme he chose for his only political play was the seemingly private one of marriage. Especially the last scene suggests that the power struggle within marriage is for him a reflection of a similar struggle in society as a whole. The play's programmatic call to "Know and Change!" became the title of Döblin's next book, a tract in which he tried to define his own political position."

In reading the play in German, I was struck by its experimental nature, and I feel it justly deserves a new translation and a revival in contemporary theater--no longer confined to the dustbin of history.

5 stars. ]]>