Manas

by Alfred Döblin, Chris Godwin (Translator)

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 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 of fiction, a break from the bourgeois no more playing with 'plot', 'suspense', 'individuals' with invented 'psychologies', no more cheap eroticism.

Doblin's fictions – all substantial Wallenstein, the Amazonas trilogy, November 1918 are each three to four times longer than Manas – are best conceived, he said, as symphonies. They proceed not so much by plot-action (though Manas does have a very forward-moving plot) as by themes and motifs that swell and fade, appear and reappear in tempi slow or fast, employing an orchestra of voices. And these symphonic fictions in their varied guises do indeed pursue, over forty years, matters of enduring human concern.

Genres: Fiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Bruno Alfred Döblin (August 10, 1878 – June 26, 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters — his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Fischer Verlag, span more than thirty volumes. His first published novel, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lung (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun), appeared in 1915 and his final novel, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (Tales of a Long Night) was published in 1956, one year before his death.

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There was no more rain.
Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down
From the eastern iceheads of Himalaya,
Blew them into mountains and cedar forests
Onto blooming meadows, southerly slopes,
This bedlam of beasts and trees -
Euphorbia acacia stands of bamboo -
Tossed them, torrents and ice-needles,
Over sheer rockwalls, seething hills and spates,
Over rivers, -
They raced thundering down deep valleys,
Kosi, Alaknanda, Yamuna,
Surged onto the radiant plains of India! -
Storms shredded the black clouds away,
Howled."

Manas is at first glance a bit of a difficult epic of Döblins to classify.

Clocking in at a 13,000 line epic poem about a Hindu god attempting to achieve full consciousness, it serves as a transitional piece to Berlin Alexanderplatz where he is concentrating on the individual and is a further exploration of the lyrical style he explored in Mountains Oceans Giants, but metamorphosing into an actual poetic verse form. Manas is an existential piece as well.

Döblin uses the Field of the Dead as an exploration of his depression in the mid to late 1920's owing to the failed reception of his early BA works and there are punctuation less, comma less verse lines in various parts of the poem.

Savitri acts as a stand in for Döblin's mistress in the 1920's, the photographer Charlotte Niclas, and Manas's rebirth through the love of Savitri is almost a prelude to Döblin's successful breakthrough in his writing career with BA.

It's filled with repetition, and it courts comparisons to the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In many ways, the existential struggle for the soul and spirit of Manas seems to foreshadow Franz Biberkopf's spiritual struggle in the closing parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Reading the poem can be a difficult but richly rewarding experience for those trying to find clues to Döblin's stylistic development up to Berlin Alexanderplatz.

"He is not extinguished. Not extinguished.
Manas is not extinguished."

[Didier Vanoverbeke]

The 1920s, literature's wild years. though you'll have to wander many halls of the Great Library to view this exhibit.

[Isaac Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the English version, was astounded by the poetry of the prose, the incredible account, mimetic of great Indian epics.