The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland icecap. Why? - to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the unruly masses. How? - by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth from Iceland's volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly wrong... In the early 1920s confirmed city-dweller Alfred Doblin - he was 15 before he saw his first cherry tree - became puzzled by a nagging sense of Nature: "I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for explanations. Textbooks... knew nothing of the secret. Every day I experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly mingle and criss-cross." Readers accustomed to following a story via Plot and Character may at first be disoriented by this epic of the future. Its structure is more symphonic than novelistic, driven by themes and motifs that emerge, fade back, emerge again in new orchestral voicings and new tempi. The prose - supple, rhythmic, harsh, elegiac, tender, unsparing - propels the reader on through scene after vivid scene. Mountains Oceans Giants is a literary counterpart to the painted dreams and nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgement. Alfred Doblin, born in Szczecin in 1878, initially worked as a medical assistant and opened his own practice in Berlin in 1911. Doblin's first novel appeared in 1915/16. His greatest success was the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz published in 1929. In 1933 Doblin emigrated to France and finally to the USA. After the end of the 2nd World War he moved back to Germany, but then moved in 1953 with his family to Paris. He died on June 26, 1957. Berlin Alexanderplatz (translated by Michael Hofman) is published by Penguin in the UK and New York Review Books in the USA.

"In 1915, fourteen years before Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin published his first novel, an amazing, extensively researched Chinese historical extravaganza: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Even more remarkably, given its subject matter, the book was written in expressionist style and is now considered the first modern German novel, as well as the first Western novel to depict a China untouched by the West. Based on actual accounts of a doomed rebellion during the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the late eighteenth century, the novel tells the story of Wang Lun, a historical martial arts master and charismatic leader of the White Lotus sect, who leads a futile revolt of the "Truly Powerless." Densely packed cities and Tibetan wastes, political intrigue and religious yearning, imperial court life and the fate of wandering outcasts are depicted in a language of enormous vigor and matchless imagination, unfolding the theme of timidity against force and a mystical sense of the world against the realities of power"--

NY 1983 first American edition. Fromm. Hardcover. In English. Large octavo, 547pp. Fine in Near Fine DJ. No ownership marks. Historical novel of Germany in early twentieth century.