Genre Fiction
![Wolfgang Hilbig - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001I81N2M.jpg)
The Interim
"Bilious and bleakly funny…Hilbig is one of the essential voices of the Cold War, and deserves to be as well known in the Anglophone world as Thomas Bernhard or Günter Grass. In The Interim he captures the despair and disorientation of a generation of German intellectuals who found themselves without a side to join." ―Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
C. is a wretched grump, an anguished patron of bars, brothels, and train stations. He is also an acclaimed East German writer. Dogged by writer's block, remorse, and national guilt in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he leaves the monochromatic existence of the GDR for the neon excess of the West. There at least the novelty of his origins grant him easy money and minor celebrity, if also a deflating sense of complacency. With his visa expired and several relationships hanging in the balance, C. travels back and forth, mentally and physically, between two Germanys, contemplating diverging visions of the world and what they mean for people like him: alienated and aimless witnesses to history.
This monumental novel from one of the greatest chroniclers of postwar Germany, masterfully translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, interrogates with bitter wit and singular brilliance the detritus of twentieth-century life: addiction, consumerism, God, pay-per-view pornography, selfishness, statelessness, and above all else, the writer's place in a "century of lies."
C. is a wretched grump, an anguished patron of bars, brothels, and train stations. He is also an acclaimed East German writer. Dogged by writer's block, remorse, and national guilt in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he leaves the monochromatic existence of the GDR for the neon excess of the West. There at least the novelty of his origins grant him easy money and minor celebrity, if also a deflating sense of complacency. With his visa expired and several relationships hanging in the balance, C. travels back and forth, mentally and physically, between two Germanys, contemplating diverging visions of the world and what they mean for people like him: alienated and aimless witnesses to history.
This monumental novel from one of the greatest chroniclers of postwar Germany, masterfully translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, interrogates with bitter wit and singular brilliance the detritus of twentieth-century life: addiction, consumerism, God, pay-per-view pornography, selfishness, statelessness, and above all else, the writer's place in a "century of lies."
Editorial Reviews
"Translated into supple, vivid English by Isabel Fargo Cole… [Hilbig's] C. takes bitter pride in being a writer, an identity he feels the authoritis long tried to deny him…" ―The New York Times
"Rich in references to the German Romantic traditions of Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hilbig's writing has also been compared with the Gothic style of Poe. In many ways, his meandering sentences and attention to the thick mist of consciousness resemble the voice of Thomas Bernhard, though charged with a metaphysician's sense for the peculiar details of materials―his novels are littered with objects and landscapes that seem to have their own autonomous lives..… Further translations of [Hilbig's] work will doubtless continue to light up our understanding of this great artist, a writer who shaped his life and work in the tradition of the grandest of pessimisms." ―Charles Prusik, Hopscotch Translation
"This is a superb portrait of a writer who has totally lost his way. …[The Interim] may well be Hilbig's masterpiece." ―The Modern Novel
"Unexpectedly gripping―an unconventional inquiry into one man's morals and sense of home.…A searing trip into the recent past and into one man's inner landscape." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This engrossing work from the late Hilbig continues the author's dedication to narratives of life in a divided Germany…a wily tale, smartly told." ―Publishers Weekly
"Bilious and bleakly funny, The Interim is narrated by a drunken writer who is lost between East and West in 1980's Germany, riding trains that never seem to take him to where he wants to be. He has one foot out of the door of the decaying German Democratic Republic, but he feels like an alien among the department stores and porno theaters of the capitalist West. Hilbig is one of the essential voices of the Cold War, and deserves to be as well known in the Anglophone world as Thomas Bernhard or Günter Grass. In The Interim he captures the despair and disorientation of a generation of German intellectuals who found themselves without a side to join." ―Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
"Ideal for our fractured times, Wolfgang Hilbig's The Interim walks the tightrope of unknowing, from East to West Berlin and back again. From dispossession and displacement to capitalism and communism, Hilbig's antihero is all of us, a stranger adrift in the modern world. Wolfgang Hilbig was a visionary, each of his novels awash in prophecy." ―Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt's Garden
"Hilbig's was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany―East or West." ―Joshua Cohen, author of...
"Rich in references to the German Romantic traditions of Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hilbig's writing has also been compared with the Gothic style of Poe. In many ways, his meandering sentences and attention to the thick mist of consciousness resemble the voice of Thomas Bernhard, though charged with a metaphysician's sense for the peculiar details of materials―his novels are littered with objects and landscapes that seem to have their own autonomous lives..… Further translations of [Hilbig's] work will doubtless continue to light up our understanding of this great artist, a writer who shaped his life and work in the tradition of the grandest of pessimisms." ―Charles Prusik, Hopscotch Translation
"This is a superb portrait of a writer who has totally lost his way. …[The Interim] may well be Hilbig's masterpiece." ―The Modern Novel
"Unexpectedly gripping―an unconventional inquiry into one man's morals and sense of home.…A searing trip into the recent past and into one man's inner landscape." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This engrossing work from the late Hilbig continues the author's dedication to narratives of life in a divided Germany…a wily tale, smartly told." ―Publishers Weekly
"Bilious and bleakly funny, The Interim is narrated by a drunken writer who is lost between East and West in 1980's Germany, riding trains that never seem to take him to where he wants to be. He has one foot out of the door of the decaying German Democratic Republic, but he feels like an alien among the department stores and porno theaters of the capitalist West. Hilbig is one of the essential voices of the Cold War, and deserves to be as well known in the Anglophone world as Thomas Bernhard or Günter Grass. In The Interim he captures the despair and disorientation of a generation of German intellectuals who found themselves without a side to join." ―Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
"Ideal for our fractured times, Wolfgang Hilbig's The Interim walks the tightrope of unknowing, from East to West Berlin and back again. From dispossession and displacement to capitalism and communism, Hilbig's antihero is all of us, a stranger adrift in the modern world. Wolfgang Hilbig was a visionary, each of his novels awash in prophecy." ―Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt's Garden
"Hilbig's was among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany―East or West." ―Joshua Cohen, author of...
Short Excerpt Teaser
At night the boiler room was the only living cell left beneath the fitting shop. Sometimes he passed like a sleepwalker through the deathly-still factory halls where the cold stars glittered in through the tall glass facades. The snow behind the glass looked blue and seemed spread for all eternity across the lifeless hilly expanses that stretched up to the bare trees of a park behind the factory yard. In the darkness of the halls his footsteps crunched on leftover metal filings, the tread of a ghost, preternaturally audible, echoing two- and threefold in that gigantic cathedral whose religion was labor. A few months ago he'd still worked here himself; now he knew of a cell filled with glowing energy lurking in the beyond beneath the concrete floor, a cell under his command, and suddenly he was the cathedral's secret god.
When he came to work at nine thirty in the evening, he'd sit right down at the long, narrow table in the boiler room and start writing. Slowly his thoughts would think their way through the beginning of a story, then reach out faster and faster. He was always writing the same stories, with just a few variations, and they had no value for anyone but him. These stories were mostly set in the woods… in the woods of his childhood, which had seemed endless to him, and he tried to replicate that endlessness in these stories. You saw a solitary figure walking through the woods, up the hills, hills stretching out as though in an uneasy dream.
When he came to work at nine thirty in the evening, he'd sit right down at the long, narrow table in the boiler room and start writing. Slowly his thoughts would think their way through the beginning of a story, then reach out faster and faster. He was always writing the same stories, with just a few variations, and they had no value for anyone but him. These stories were mostly set in the woods… in the woods of his childhood, which had seemed endless to him, and he tried to replicate that endlessness in these stories. You saw a solitary figure walking through the woods, up the hills, hills stretching out as though in an uneasy dream.
