Berlin Alexanderplatz
The German Ulysses. Doblin tells the story of a Weimar-era ex-convict's life in the Berlin underworld using montage techniques borrowed from cinema and radio: streams of consciousness, newspaper headlines, biblical allusions. Joyce praised it. Published in 1929, it captured Berlin's chaos in a form that matched it.
The first eighty pages switch between interior monologue, dialogue, and documentary noise mid-sentence with no typographic warning, and readers do not get through: "I only got to 13%," reports one; "it has taken me 3 days to read 23 pages," reports another. What they are pushing through is "massive stodge of tiresome detail, dull unattributed conversation," tram timetables and statistics stalling every scene. Franz gives them little to hold, "a simpleton ready to swallow all the snakes," repeating the same mistakes for five hundred pages. Readers arriving on the Joyce comparison feel misled twice over, finding prose "surprisingly flat, colourless and factual" and "not really anything like Joyce."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
