Star 111
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2024!
A panoramic and picaresque novel of the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is told through the experiences of a young man making his way in a time of constant change.
A bestseller in Germany and winner of the prestigous Leipzig Prize.
Star 111 (the name of a popular East German transistor radio) begins with the world turned upside down. It is the fall of 1989. The communist government of the GDR is losing its grip on power. Carl Bischoff, a very young man, trained as a bricklayer, now a college student, is abruptly recalled by his parents to the small town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. His hardworking unprotesting parents inform him, that with the border open, they intend to leave the country and check into a West German refugee camp. Will Carl to look after the house and take in the mail? They promise at some point to be in touch.
Deserted by his parents, Carl has no idea what to do. Then he packs the family car and heads to Berlin, where he joins a group of squatters led by a shepherd with a goat. Carl participates in the anarchic life of an anarchist commune, and keeps his distance too. He has all sorts of things to learn about himself and others. He is hungry for sex and love and sometimes simply hungry. He worries about his parents. He wants to be a poet.
Star 111 is a story about unforeseen ends and new beginnings, about different kinds of families, biological and improvised, and one innocent young aspiring poet in pursuit of experience at a moment in history when everything is about to change and nobody knows how. A tender, entrancing, and comic tale of youth and adventure, it is a book that looks back on the history of our time to ask the most fundamental of question: what does it mean to lead a good life?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The gorgeous latest from Seiler (In Case of Loss) offers an intimate view of a German family's reckoning with the end of the Cold War. In the autumn of 1989, as East Germany begins to fall apart, 20-something Carl Bischoff is called home from university to the small village where he was raised. With the border about to open, his parents plan to leave for a West German refugee camp. They ask Carl to stay behind—he imagines himself "the rearguard" of their house. Very soon, though, protecting his childhood home is no longer enough, as "somewhere out there, history was raging." Carl sets off for East Berlin, where he squats in a bomb-scarred building in Prenzlauer Berg and falls in with a group of German and Russian artists and punks led by an enigmatic man who's called Shepherd because he lives with his goat. Seiler crafts a fascinating intergenerational exploration of German reunification, as Carl comes to see his parents as people with wants and dreams like him, "as if they'd only just begun to exist." It's an exceptional story of fresh starts.
