The Interim

by Wolfgang Hilbig, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator)

Overview

“Comic and terrifying and profound.” —Rachel Kushner, The Guardian (Best Books of 2021)

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641424
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Editorial Reviews

Comic and terrifying and profound.” —Rachel Kushner, The Guardian

“Translated into supple, vivid English by Isabel Fargo Cole… [Hilbig’s] C. takes bitter pride in being a writer, an identity he feels the authorities long tried to deny him…” —The New York Times

“[Hilbig’s narrator] is a grouch in the tradition of Thomas Bernhard, and it is a joy…” —Times Literary Supplement

“A genuinely maverick author whose distinctive literary style is marked by visions of oozing, secreting, spilling, and sweating…Call this blue-collar Gothic—a supernatural resurgence of the means of production.” —The Baffler

“Harrowing…Hilbig shares Ingeborg Bachmann’s penchant for extended hallucination, as well as László Krasznahorkai’s prodigious descriptions of muck.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“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)

“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

“[The narrator] C’s ‘depressive inertia’ generates a recursive tale, pivoting between drink, aimless travel, and abandonments. But in one sense, The Interim really isn’t about C. at all, but rather about the underlying psyche telling this story, a mind absorbed by—and in the grip of—the grim and grimy details of C.’s peripatetic days.” —Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“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 Book of Numbers

“­Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald.” —The New York Times

“[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature.” —László Krasznahorkai, author of Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and Satantango

“[Hilbig] could very well be the writer for our time.” —Boston Review

“Whenever I read Hilbig’s books . . . I am profoundly shaken. This language practically slices me open.” —Clemens Meyer, author of Bricks and Mortar

From the Publisher

★ 2021-08-18
An embittered German writer revisits his life in this haunting novel.

Set in the waning years of a divided Germany, Hilbig’s book follows the life of C., a successful writer from East Germany with a penchant for drinking too much. The connections between East and West Germany form a substantial part of the novel, with C. crossing back and forth between the two and finding himself at home in neither. “C. was not one of the people for whom the West was the redemptive goal of all their strivings,” writes Hilbig. C.’s fraught relationship with his girlfriend, Hedda, haunts him as he moves between the two Germanys. The specificity of this novel’s time and place and C.’s haunted sense of his own failings help make it stand out. That this is a book centered around an occasionally lascivious male writer with occasional musings on his life’s connections to fiction could, in the hands of a different writer and translator, be dissonant. In this case, though, they’re illustrative, offering a better sense of C.'s alienation. Part of that is due to the sting of Hilbig’s words in Cole’s translation: C.’s pondering that he “felt like a character in a novel who’d been deserted by his creator,” for instance. And there’s a sense of despair that runs throughout the book—including C.’s own penchant for self-destructiveness, the reader’s knowledge that C.’s national status quo is about to be upended, and the recurring references to the Chernobyl disaster. The end result is 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