Under the Neomoon

This radiant collection from Hilbig (1941–2007), originally published in 1982, combines fiction, journal entries, and travelogues to paint a picture of life in 1970s East Germany. In “Breaking Loose” and “Bungalows,” the unnamed narrator describes a walking tour through the countryside; the idyll of a rural lake in the first entry gives way to the “shabby” workers’ cabins in the second. Phantasmagoric imagery appears in “Thirst,” about the residents of a town who get ghoulishly drunk as a means of escaping the awful odor of a nearby detergent factory (“The thirst grows more pressing, more unstillable... it drips and runs from all the bodies”), and in the “The End of Night,” a gothic allegory about the ravages of time featuring a coachman with “snow white fingers [on a] skeletal hand.” “The Workers: An Essai” details factory workers’ and bosses’ mutual hatred of the stoker, a low-level employee who shovels coal to keep them all warm. Hilbig revisits that character in “The Stoker,” which finds the title character, who’s also a writer, demanding to be reassigned from the boiler room and fantasizing about finishing his novel. Not all the sketches hold the reader’s attention, but Hilbig’s bold lyricism stands out, as does his textured portrait of an artist’s disillusionment with East German communism. It’s a valuable time capsule. (June)