Brutal and moving, written with Hans Fallada's gift for capturing the small tragedies of ordinary lives, Iron Gustav is a heartbreaking family chronicle and an unflinching portrayal of the First World War and its aftermath.
Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.
Every so often you come across a book so finely wrought that you
have no doubt about its status as a literary classic. Iron Gustav
is one ... The writing is visual, vivid and visceral, the irony
delicate, and even when it is cynical the novel doesn't sneer ...
Fallada's descriptions of material degradation and squalor equal
those of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He has the gift for complex
narrative of Thomas Mann combined with the page-turning powers of
great thriller writers such as Raymond Chandler, and the structural
control of a great painter or composer ... This [Penguin Modern
Classics edition] is the first authentic version of not just a
classic, but a masterpiece of world literature
*Wall Street Journal*
A powerful portrayal of the devastating effects of the first world
war on a family and a country ... The project went through a
tortuous journey, with rewrites ordered by Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler's propaganda chief, which have been taken out of the new
edition ... this new edition is as close as possible to Fallada's
original
*Observer*
Fallada captures the small tragedies of family life, the loss of
dignity caused by unemployment, squalid housing and the misery of
seeing civilized values destroyed. This anti-war book, censored by
Goebbels in the Thirties, is a gripping addition to modern German
history
*Daily Mail*
There is a serious cause for celebration: one of the finest
German-language works of the 20th century is now available as it
was intended to be read ... A vivid, atmospheric portrait of Berlin
... Fallada's literary genius rests not only in how he can sustain
a multithreaded narrative but in how he, apparently effortlessly,
develops characters through chronicling their actions ... the book
triumphs as a study of ordinary Berliners faced with dire
adversity; Fallada celebrates them repeatedly, their wariness,
their humour, their toughness, their blunt kindness and, above all,
their conversation ... This remarkable work, now complete after 76
years, could well be one of the finest novels any of us will ever
read. Hans Fallada really was that most rare creature, a born
novelist who was also a witness
*Irish Times*
The 'hundreds of deep rifts' that tear defeated Germany apart play
out in microcosm within [Iron Gustav's] family ... Fallada shuffles
melodrama, farce and documentary realism ... This, as even Dr
Goebbels must have seen, is laughter in the dark
*Independent*
A powerful novel ... this new version is something of a publishing
coup as it is the first time we have the novel in its entirety in
English ... Iron Gustav acutely highlights the chequered fortunes
of the ordinary 'little man' against the larger picture of
Germany's moral and economic breakdown ... [this is] a saga with
the same reach and depth as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks ... a
chronicle of Berlin in those turbulent early decades of the 20th
century. Key events appear like milestones: war, Versailles,
lawless street-fighting, hyperinflation, Weimar hedonism and the
first dark shoots of Nazism ... This is a social history writ large
and mercifully free of sanctimonious preaching or soft-focus
distortions ... Fallada's voice is as beguilingly lucid as ever,
his images clear to the point of stark, his blighted and resilient
Berliners ringing astoundingly true
*National*
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