The Interim (Hardcover)

The Interim By Wolfgang Hilbig, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator) Cover Image
$22.95
In our warehouse - should arrive/ship in 5-10 business days. (Currently not on our shelves.)

November 2021 Indie Next List


“A transcendent reading experience about a German culture cleaved in two, and a man trying to find his way through the middle. A masterpiece of one of European literature’s finest authors.”
— Matt Keliher, SubText Books, St. Paul, MN

Description


"Comic and terrifying and profound." --Rachel Kushner, The Guardian (Best Books 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: 9781949641233
ISBN-10: 1949641236
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Publication Date: November 2nd, 2021
Pages: 256
Language: English