Wednesday, June 20, 2018

“The guts wobble and lurch”

Franz Biberkopf at lunch: “he slices and squashes and bolts and snuffles and gulps and swallows.” And then the stomach gets to work:


Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Compare the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses. As Mary Roach observes (without reference to Döblin or Joyce), “you too are an organism, a chewing, digesting sack of guts.”

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

comments: 2

Geo-B said...

My guts wobbled and lurched, just reading this.

Michael Leddy said...

I know. I like this passage (no pun intended), but there’s no good time to post it. (I chose “after breakfast but well before lunch.”)