RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksMichael Hofmann’s new translation now promises to awaken readers to the relevance of Berlin Alexanderplatz as an urgent, raw account of modernity ... Hofmann’s accomplishment is to reimagine in English how the novel talks, squawks, screeches, and curses in Döblin’s German. The original is a gabby thing, and Hofmann too makes his translation talk in many voices ... The language remains impressively taut and sharp throughout ... Hofmann brilliantly creates a linguistic force field that captures the spirit and inflection of the original, choosing a word here and an expression there that slowly build the sense of a close-knit, grimy, grotesque world ... We come away having tasted that heart, and all the strange, succulent marrow of Döblin’s epic.
