The Interim

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

“In a flurry of travel and binges, [Hilbig’s C.] is both seduced and repelled by the West’s novelties and permissiveness—a funny yet anguished mind caught between competing visions of the world.”
—The New York Times

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

“Like Hilbig’s C., with his propensity for loitering in train stations, I found myself drawn in 2021 to the idea of the transitional, the fractured, the in-between.”
—Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review (Favorite Books of 2021)

“Of all the many literary images for Germany’s long, difficult process of coming to terms with its past…there is none quite so unforgettable as one that comes late on in Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim.…In Hilbig’s visions, this dissolution of boundaries—between nations and classes, present and past—feels almost ecstatic. It is the main source of dynamism in The Interim’s stuffed-up world.”
—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..… If many of Hilbig’s novellas operate with a high degree of abstraction in their exploration of space and time, The Interim is the most sustained and direct confrontation with the social and political nature of the East German regime.… 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 

“The late author’s 2000 novel may well be his best… Hilbig’s portrayal of a broken, ineffectual man awash in an age of dislocation is both vigorous and unyielding. The Interim, for all its bleakness and melancholia, gleams brilliantly with the incandescence of an all-consuming inferno.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s (Portland, OR)

“Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim is the revered German writer’s most complete and erudite of his works translated into English. Isabel Fargo Cole doesn’t miss a beat of Hilbig’s humor and disorientation. The Interim reads like literature crawling out of the drain; the novel’s narrator, known only as C., is both loveable and inescapable in his singular history of two Germanies: East and West. As C. has it: ‘Literature that refused to serve the purpose of distraction was punished by being passed over on the market. . . the best distraction was what sold the best.’ The Interim is the opposite of such distraction; it also happens to be a damn good book.”
—Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

“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)

“Beware, Hilbig’s gut-wrenching prose may haunt you for days. The Interim is dark, perfectly befitting dark times.”
—Kay Wosewick, Boswell’s Books (Milwaukee, WI)

“Our ‘hero’ takes us on many liquor-fueled Mobius Teacup Rides between East and West Germany, keeping the limbo bench warm on the sidelines of love and lust, looking for someone, something, or some country to blame for his writer’s block, impotence, and irresponsibility. Told in such a comedic, controlled scatter to keep the reader comfortably teetered on a seat’s edge, if sitting’s a thing said reader’s into.”
—Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)

“What a treat that we have yet another of Hilbig’s great works available in English, thanks to Two Lines Press and translator Isabel Fargo Cole. Hilbig’s wonderfully perceptive descriptions of everyday life are on full display in this funny, melancholy tale of a writer, C, whose life is in a perpetual holding pattern due to his chronic indecisiveness. The Interim is an absurd, poignant exploration of being ‘stuck,’ and one man’s struggle to understand his life and his art. Simply wonderful!”
—Lori Feathers, Interabang Books (Dallas, TX)

“As a reader in a politically divided America at the beginning of the 21st Century, I find a lot to learn from and admire in the work of postwar German writers. Wolfgang Hilbig is among the best of those writers and The Interim is the best of his books. Hilbig’s prose is layered and rich in Isabel Fargo Cole’s terrific translation, often resulting in moments of astonishing lucidity… A part of me will always be thinking about The Interim.”
—Timothy Otte, Wild Rumpus Books (Minneapolis, MN)

“A revelation in European literature to me. A shambling, anxiety-riddled writer shuttles between East and West Germany at the end of the ‘century of lies’, mournfully chronicling a modernity that’s gone awry.”
—Calum Barnes, Blackwell’s Books (Oxford, UK)

Praise for Wolfgang Hilbig

“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