THE INTERIM

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.