The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland
icecap. Why? - to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the
unruly masses. How? - by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth
from Iceland's volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly
wrong...
In the early 1920s confirmed city-dweller Alfred Doblin - he was 15
before he saw his first cherry tree - became puzzled by a nagging sense
of Nature:
"I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for
explanations. Textbooks... knew nothing of the secret. Every day I
experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light,
dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly
mingle and criss-cross."
Readers accustomed to following a story via Plot and Character may at
first be disoriented by this epic of the future. Its structure is more
symphonic than novelistic, driven by themes and motifs that emerge, fade
back, emerge again in new orchestral voicings and new tempi. The prose -
supple, rhythmic, harsh, elegiac, tender, unsparing - propels the reader
on through scene after vivid scene. Mountains Oceans Giants is a
literary counterpart to the painted dreams and nightmares of Hieronymus
Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgement.
Alfred Doblin, born in Szczecin in 1878, initially worked as a medical
assistant and opened his own practice in Berlin in 1911. Doblin's first
novel appeared in 1915/16. His greatest success was the novel Berlin
Alexanderplatz published in 1929. In 1933 Doblin emigrated to France and
finally to the USA. After the end of the 2nd World War he moved back to
Germany, but then moved in 1953 with his family to Paris. He died on
June 26, 1957.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (translated by Michael Hofman) is published by
Penguin in the UK and New York Review Books in the USA.
