This remarkable book - an exciting and intriguing story, a blend of
Hindu mythology and existentialism and told with great verve in a
vigorous, direct language of many moods and voices - is one of the major
fictions Alfred Doblin produced over the forty tumultuous years
pre-World War 1 to post-World War 2.
Doblin himself is one of the least known of the twentieth century's
great German writers, though his reputation has grown in Germany since
his death in 1957: smart new editions appear every decade or so, and
streams of books, journal articles and scholarly colloquia examine
aspects of his art and his thinking.
The Anglophone reader comes to Doblin with little idea what to expect.
Maybe a vague knowledge of that one title from his vast output: Berlin
Alexanderplatz - The Story of Franz Biberkopf. The next novel after
Manas, it has eclipsed all the rest ever since its publication in 1929.
Doblin's reputation rests largely on the major fictions he called
'epics'. He wanted a new kind of fiction, a break from the bourgeois
novel: no more playing with 'plot', 'suspense', 'individuals' with
invented 'psychologies', no more cheap eroticism.
Doblin's fictions - all substantial works: Wallenstein, the Amazonas
trilogy, November 1918 are each three to four times longer than Manas -
are best conceived, he said, as symphonies. They proceed not so much by
plot-action (though Manas does have a very forward-moving plot) as by
themes and motifs that swell and fade, appear and reappear in tempi slow
or fast, employing an orchestra of voices. And these symphonic fictions
in their varied guises do indeed pursue, over forty years, matters of
enduring human concern.
