Read and Appreciated in 2002
A Year’s Best List
I read mostly nonfiction, but this year I investigated some novels about the l930s. The one that moved me most deeply was Eugene Jolas’s translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin.
I tracked this down because Rainer Fassbinder once made a film series for German television based on it. I’ve wanted to see that series for years and still haven’t, but this year I read the book. And what a hell of a book. It really ripped me up.
Doblin, according to the cover copy, was an author and a practicing physician in the working-class district called Alexanderplatz. He emigrated to the US in 1933. Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered an early work of modernism, and it certainly has Joycean passages wherein Doblin collages newspaper extracts, stream of consciousness, and authorial digressions. But in its broad outline, it’s a conventional naturalistic narrative about a man’s life shaking apart among the laborers and petty criminals of a big dirty city.
When we meet our protagonist Franz Biberkopf, he’s just been released from Tegel Prison after doing a stretch for accidentally beating his wife to death, (if you can call that sort of thing an accident.) When Franz gets out of prison, as Doblin tells us, “the punishment begins.” The story has just started, and already the irony is thick. Franz is a complacent fool and an entrenched sinner, and above all he’s a dedicated apologist for his faults. He’s all male ego and a yard wide. But whether he likes it or not, Doblin has planted him on a road toward loss, rage, collapse, madness, an epiphany of shame, and a return to daily life as a changed man. Doblin certainly had the stuff.
In the same vein (meaning the novel of character study), I got through two thirds of the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. Read these if you’re curious about the emotional life of working-class Irish Catholic boy growing up in street-car-era Chicago. The sociology and slang and meals and smells and street noise of this milieu interest me partly because my father grew up in depression-era Chicago.
Studs, like Franz, lives an unexamined life and spends most of his waking hours dreaming of great things and bemoaning his bad breaks. He’s overflowing with aspirations, doubts, lust, laziness, and hostility and can’t figure out what to do with any of it. His life never really goes anywhere, and then he dies young. Pretty depressing but fairly typical of life on earth.
Farrell was quite brave about reporting on gritty realities like condoms, race hatred, random violence, unwanted pregnancies, and slow-burning alcoholism. Topics were cropping up in American lit that simply weren’t discussed previously. Not just current events, but personal shit. Authors like Balzac and Zola broke this ground so that guys like Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair could plant it, and guys like Farrell and John Dos Passos could reap a harvest. Now it’s impossible to shock anybody about anything. Television did that, and I hope it’s proud of itself. I wonder where the novel is bound for next.
