The Sleep of the Righteous - by Wolfgang Hilbig (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: Der Schlaf der Gerechten. Frankfurt am Maim: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Ã2002.

Book Synopsis

Doppelgängers, a murderer's guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances--these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation's trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and so many of his fellow Germans. Evoking the eerie bleakness of films like Tarkovsky's Stalker and The Lives of Others, this titan of German letters combines the Romanticism of Poe with the absurdity of Kafka to create a visionary, somber statement on the ravages of history and the promises of the future.

Review Quotes

Named a Flavorwire Best Independent Book of 2015

"Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature," -- László Krasznahorkai, recipient of the 2015 International Man Booker Prize and author of Satantango and Seiobo There Below

"-Evokes the luminous prose of W.G. Sebald. . . . Hilbig's masterly work captures the angst of a man unable to escape the wreckage of his past." -- The New York Times

"Out of the ugliness of history and the wasted landscape of his home, he has created stories of disconsolate beauty." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Unusually accessible for Hilbig . . . the paralyzing duality of identity in his relationship to East and West runs through the collection." -- the Times Literary Supplement

"[Hilbig writes as] Edgar Allan Poe could have written if he had been born in Communist East Germany." -- Los Angeles Review of Books

"Hilbig's prose is vivid and poetic, and a Kafkaesque touch gives these stories ample atmosphere." -- Publishers Weekly

"Beautiful, dream-like stories of the pain and wonder of becoming oneself." -- Die Zeit

"Wolfgang Hilbig is on the track of the truth. Once he has found it, he is not afraid to look it straight in the face." -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Pure, masterful . . . a calmly, powerfully flowing stream of words that stops time like an endless spell of intoxication." -- Süddeutsche Zeitung

About the Author

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) and The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013). 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.

László Krasznahorkai is the recipient of the 2015 International Man Booker Prize. He is the author of Seiobo There Below, Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and others. He lives in New York City.