What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are liespossibly heinous ones? In
Old Rendering PlantWolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and historys darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memorys mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone indebted to Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.
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 Coleis a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations includeBoys and Murderersby Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006),All the Roads Are Openby Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011),The Jew Carby Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013), andThe Sleep of the Righteousby 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 lÓ;
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