The Interim

✍ Scribed by Wolfgang Hilbig

• Publisher: Two Lines Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 163 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1949641236

✦ Synopsis

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:...