Synopses & Reviews
From a writer whose work is considered “among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany” (Joshua Cohen), a digressive masterwork in the tradition of Heinrich Böll, Imre Kértesz, and Daša Drndić.
Two competing visions of progress loom over two horizons. To the East, the workers in their factories. To the West, capitalism, pleasure, so-called freedom. Somewhere in between, a writer drifts.
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.”
Review
“Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature.” László Krasznahorkai, author of Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and Satantango
Review
“Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald.” The New York Times
Review
“[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany.” Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
“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 Book of Numbers
Review
“Whenever I read Hilbig’s books... I am profoundly shaken. This language practically slices me open.” Clemens Meyer, author of Bricks and Mortar
About the Author
Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. Though raised in East Germany, he proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to emigrate west. The author of over 20 books, he received virtually all of Germany's major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany's highest literary honor.
Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006), All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011), The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013), and The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig. The recipient of a prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Grant in 2013, she is the initiator and co-editor of No-mans-land.org, an online magazine for new German literature in English.