The Interim
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In The Interim, Wolfgang Hilbig's fierce and digressive masterwork, 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.
An anguished creature of bars, brothels, and train stations, C. is also an acclaimed East German writer. Broken by writer’s block, personal shame, and national guilt, 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 crushing sense of complacency. With his visa about to expire and several relationships hanging in the balance, C. travels back and forth—mentally and physically—between these two Germanys, contemplating, while strolling listlessly through red light districts in a boozy fog, these diverging visions of the world and what they mean for people like him: disaffected and aimless witnesses to history.
What good is freedom if it only leads to exploitation and self-destruction? To ceaseless burning gas and rubber? What role do individuals—unique, stubborn, uniquely stubborn—play in a society driven by factory quotas and tired idealism? 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 late 20th-Century life: alcoholism, car culture, consumerism, God, love, statelessness, and above all else, the writer’s place in a “century of lies.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This engrossing work from the late Hilbig (The Females), who died in 2007, continues the author's dedication to narratives of life in a divided Germany during the Cold War. C., an alcoholic East German writer in his mid-40s who has lost his joie de vivre, shuttles between East and West Germany in the late 1980s after he is invited to the West for a yearlong fellowship. He leaves his partner behind and, once settled, sparks a relationship with Hedda. Their love is stormy at best, and C. spends his year traveling for reading events, questioning consumerism, flailing at writing, and drinking himself into depressions. He escapes back to the East frequently, though once he lets his visa lapse, he remains in the West during the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, nostalgic for the land he can no longer visit and pondering where he truly belongs. Darkly funny, Hilbig's novel eddies around C.'s indecision as his thoughts fold in on themselves and he spins his wheels as life passes by. Though certain jags work better than others, the novel succeeds in replicating the uncertainty of a life in late Cold War Germany. C., as avatar of East and West, struggles to find purchase amid the chaos. It's a wily tale, smartly told.
