Berlin Alexanderplatz

<p><b>The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael Hofmann<br><br></b>Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.<br><br>A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, <i>Berlin Alexanderplatz </i>is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city.<br><br><i>Berlin Alexanderplatz </i>brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighbourhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to <i>Berlin Alexanderplatz </i>in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Döblin's masterpiece.</p>