The interim

Select an Action

The interim

Title:

The interim

Author:

Hilbig, Wolfgang, 1941-2007, author.

Uniform Title:

Provisorium. English

ISBN:

9781949641233

Physical Description:

289 pages ; 21 cm.

General Note:

"Originally published in German as Das Provisorium"--Title page verso.

Subject Term:

Authors -- Fiction.

Alcoholism -- Fiction.

Cold War -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Germany (East) -- Fiction.

Germany (West) -- Fiction.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Added Author:

Cole, Isabel Fargo, 1973-

Summary:

"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." --

Language Note:

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Oakdale Library	FICTION HIL	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	FICTION HIL	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	FICTION HIL	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"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."

Author Notes

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.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Nov.)

Kirkus Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Excerpts

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. Excerpted from The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Excerpts

Excerpts

Helpful Links

Research Links

Contact

Events and Rooms

Follow Us

Today's Hours