A man steps out of Tegel Prison and the city of Berlin crashes over him like a wave, its trams and advertisements and slaughterhouses and newspaper headlines flooding the page in a torrent of voices that will not be silenced. Published in 1929, this novel became the great modernist epic of the German capital, absorbing the techniques of Joyce and cinema and montage and turning them loose on the story of Franz Biberkopf, an ex-convict who wants only to become a decent man and is destroyed by the effort. The city is the true protagonist, rendered in all its brutal, magnificent cacophony. Modern life does not narrate itself in orderly sentences, and this novel matches the chaos of its subject with a form equally wild and alive.