Manas

This remarkable book - an exciting and intriguing story, a blend of Hindu mythology and existentialism and told with great verve in a vigorous, direct language of many moods and voices - is one of the major fictions Alfred Doblin produced over the forty tumultuous years pre-World War 1 to post-World War 2. Doblin himself is one of the least known of the twentieth century's great German writers, though his reputation has grown in Germany since his death in 1957: smart new editions appear every decade or so, and streams of books, journal articles and scholarly colloquia examine aspects of his art and his thinking. The Anglophone reader comes to Doblin with little idea what to expect. Maybe a vague knowledge of that one title from his vast output: Berlin Alexanderplatz - The Story of Franz Biberkopf. The next novel after Manas, it has eclipsed all the rest ever since its publication in 1929. Doblin's reputation rests largely on the major fictions he called 'epics'. He wanted a new kind o

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