Mountains Oceans Giants

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...

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 Döblin, born in Szczecin in 1878, initially worked as a medical assistant and opened his own practice in Berlin in 1911. Döblin's first novel appeared in 1915/16. In 1933 Döblin 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.

Extravagant praise for this novel:

"I know of no attempt in literature that pulls together so boldly and directly the human and the divine, piling on every kind of action, thought, desire, love... Here perhaps the true face of Expressionism reveals itself for the first time. Max Krell 

The account of the expedition to Iceland and the defrosting of Greenland generates a poetry of fact that deserves to be considered a major literary achievement. Döblin and Høeg remind us that man is not the centre of a divine cosmos but simply a phenomenon, an unruly and destructive one, within the unimaginably larger system of nature.   Richie Robertson, 2009, comparing Mountains Oceans Giants with Peter Høeg s 1993 novel Miss Smilla s Feeling for Snow

this extravagant book, whose theme is the heaven-storming extravagance of humanity, written as if under a visionary over-pressure Gunter Grass 1978

A unique and mighty work. The writer has created a gigantic animated teeming living world-picture, analytical and mysterious, mythical and scientific. He has unsealed a flask of powerful potion. Ernst Blass, in Die neue Rundschau 35 (1924).