A welcome refurbishing of a masterpiece of literary modernism, one of the most significant German novels of the 20th century.
“On Tuesday, 14 August 1928 von Arnim planted a bullet in the body of Pussi Uhl”: no, it’s not The Sopranos but instead a classic German novel of the criminal demimonde of the Weimar era.
Franz Biberkopf is fresh out of prison, where he drew a few years for killing a woman. A low-level criminal otherwise, he finds himself in a different world, one in which Nazis are beginning to occupy the stage and people are lining up to take sides all around him. He flirts with fascism, but so does everyone; one of his confidants is outraged that a friend married an American woman who turned out to be a “Negress” and who, when confronted with the fact of her ancestry in divorce court, tried to sue for damages. "Gorgeous woman, petal-white, descended from Negroes, maybe dating back to the seventeenth century. Damages.” Franz soon tires of politics, even if he buys the newspaper with “the green swastika on the masthead” and believes its lurid tales. Meanwhile, he makes halfhearted efforts to live a straight life, mostly because, as one chapter title tells us, “The Police HQ is on Alexanderplatz,” the Berlin square that Biberkopf haunts. Still, he can’t help but fall back into bad habits. There are other characters at work along the Alexanderplatz, though, more fantastic as the Ulyssean story progresses: at one point, anticipating Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, two angels accompany Franz, “two angels on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in 1928 alongside a former manslaughterer, then burglar and pimp.” They provide clarity, for now death is stalking Franz—and everyone he knows and the whole of Berlin. American readers will have to adjust their ears to the translation’s frequent use of Cockney (“Well, who’d’you fink, the fat girl, coz I had no goods left on me”), but Hofmann’s version is vigorous and fresh, bringing Döblin to a new generation of readers.
A welcome refurbishing of a masterpiece of literary modernism, one of the most significant German novels of the 20th century.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-199-3
Page Count: 502
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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