Overview

A marriage gone horribly wrong; a secret female friendship and affair; a murder plot. This precursor to the true crime genre is told by Alfred D blin, one of the giants of 20th century German literature and author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which was named a Guardian Top 100 Books of All Time. What would it take for a woman to poison her husband? Young couple Elli and Link have been married for a year when Elli meets Gretchen, and the two soon become friends. When Elli confides in her friend about the abuse she suffers at her husband's hands, they hatch a plan for Elli to escape. But when their efforts prove unsuccessful, the pair begin to discuss a more permanent solution to Elli's problem- poison. Based on a famous murder trial which took place in Berlin in 1923, this short novel by the master of German modernism, Alfred D blin, explores questions of moral culpability and societal expectations which remain as relevant today as in the 1920s.

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9781922330383

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Reviews

'A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses.' * New Yorker on Berlin Alexanderplatz * '[An] immense and splendidly gritty novel...funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled.' * Paris Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'Doeblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind...One of the great anti-war novels of our time.' * Australian Book Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'I learned more about the essence of the epic from Doeblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.' * Bertolt Brecht on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'As gripping today as it was when published in 1924.' * Australian Women's Weekly * 'For the reader it is as frightening as it is perplexing, as Doeblin has leapt off a true event into an all-involving piece of art.' * Otago Daily Times *

'I learned more about the essence of the epic from Doeblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.' * Bertolt Brecht on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'Doeblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind...One of the great anti-war novels of our time.' * Australian Book Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * '[An] immense and splendidly gritty novel...funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled.' * Paris Review on Berlin Alexanderplatz * 'A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses.' * New Yorker on Berlin Alexanderplatz *

Author Information

Alfred D blin (1878-1957) was a German novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was also a doctor, practising psychiatry in working-class Berlin, the setting of both his most famous novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his true-crime tale Two Women and A Poisoning. In 1933, D blin was forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish origins and lived in France and the USA for the duration of the war. Imogen Taylor is a translator who has lived in Berlin since 2001. Her translations include Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber, Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit and The Truth and Other Lies by Sasha Arango.

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