This remarkable book - an exciting and intriguing story, a blend of Hindu mythology and existentialism and told with great verve in a vigorous, direct language of many moods and voices - is one of the major fictions Alfred Doblin produced over the forty tumultuous years pre-World War 1 to post-World War 2. Doblin himself is one of the least known of the twentieth century's great German writers, though his reputation has grown in Germany since his death in 1957: smart new editions appear every decade or so, and streams of books, journal articles and scholarly colloquia examine aspects of his art and his thinking.