Biblioklept

Wolfgang Hilbig’s novella Old Rendering Plant (translated from German by Isabel Fargo Cole) is new from Two Lines Press. It looks pretty cool—a blurb from the NYT comparing him to Sebald and that quote on the cover from Krasznahorkai don’t hurt either. Here’s TLP’s blurb:

What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are lies—possibly heinous ones? In Old Rendering Plant Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history’s 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 memory’s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone worthy of Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.

Suggestive and menacing? Poe and Joyce? This one’s next on my list. I was hoping to dig into it over the July 4th weekend(ish), but I was a bit crosseyed from Bloody Marys and other good spirits, and got almost no reading done for five days in a row.

I loved the last novella I read from Two Lines, by the way—João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner.