Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred DöblinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stylistically, not really my cup of tea. I have read so many other reviews all singing this book's praises. I don't get it. I have read in several places that this is "an important work". I don't get this either.
It is original, I'll give it that. It also has an artistic backbone which is very clever, so I liked that. Finally, it is an effective slice of history of the Weimar Republic. It does a good job revealing the underbelly of Berlin in the late 1920's.
However, I found myself yearning for a single declarative sentence. Maybe a little more punctuation, so you know who is speaking? The stream of consciousness thing doesn't work in a novel. Fine for poetry...but it gets cumbersome when there are chapters and chapters of it. As a reader, I felt I had to work too hard throughout to figure out what was going on.
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