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Old Rendering Plant
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.
109 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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910 people want to read
About the author
Wolfgang Hilbig
36 books51 followersWolfgang Hilbig was born on 31 August 1941 in the small town of Meuselwitz in Saxony, Germany, about 40 kilometers south of Leipzig. Hilbig’s childhood in Meuselwitz, a target for Allied bombings during World War II and later the site for a thriving brown coal industry (much to the detriment of the environment) during the East German era, has had an influence on much of the writer’s work. Hilbig grew up with his mother and her parents in Meuselwitz, never having known his father, who was reported missing in 1942 during the Battle of Stalingrad.
At first Hilbig favoured poetry, but his works
remained unpublished in the GDR. He received attention from the West however, as a result of his poems in the Anthology 'Cries For Help From The Other Side' (1978). His first volume of poetry, Absence (1979) was published by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. For this, Hilbig was fined.
At the end of the 1970s, Hilbig gave up his day job and began to work exclusively as a writer. With the support of Franz Fühmann, a few of his poems were printed in a GDR newspaper for the first time. His prose anthology, Unterm Neomond (1982) was published by S. Fischer, followed by Stimme Stimme (1983), a prose and poetry anthology published by Reclam in Leipzig
In 1985 Hilbig gained a visa for West Germany valid until 1990. During this time he published not only further poetry and prose, but also his first novel, Eine Uebertragung (1989), which was received well by literary critics.
Even after reunification, the main themes of his work remained the dual-existence of working and writing in the GDR and the search for individuality. His further works include: his second novel, Ich (1993); his collections of short stories, such as Die Arbeit an den Oefen (1994) and Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1996); and his third novel Das Provisorium (2000). Autobiographical themes are often prevalent.
Awards
1983 Hanau Brothers-Grimm-Prize
1989 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
1993 Brandenburg Literature Prize
1997 Fontane Prize (the Berlin Academy of Arts)
2002 Georg Büchner Prize
At first Hilbig favoured poetry, but his works
remained unpublished in the GDR. He received attention from the West however, as a result of his poems in the Anthology 'Cries For Help From The Other Side' (1978). His first volume of poetry, Absence (1979) was published by S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. For this, Hilbig was fined.
At the end of the 1970s, Hilbig gave up his day job and began to work exclusively as a writer. With the support of Franz Fühmann, a few of his poems were printed in a GDR newspaper for the first time. His prose anthology, Unterm Neomond (1982) was published by S. Fischer, followed by Stimme Stimme (1983), a prose and poetry anthology published by Reclam in Leipzig
In 1985 Hilbig gained a visa for West Germany valid until 1990. During this time he published not only further poetry and prose, but also his first novel, Eine Uebertragung (1989), which was received well by literary critics.
Even after reunification, the main themes of his work remained the dual-existence of working and writing in the GDR and the search for individuality. His further works include: his second novel, Ich (1993); his collections of short stories, such as Die Arbeit an den Oefen (1994) and Die Kunde von den Bäumen (1996); and his third novel Das Provisorium (2000). Autobiographical themes are often prevalent.
Awards
1983 Hanau Brothers-Grimm-Prize
1989 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize
1993 Brandenburg Literature Prize
1997 Fontane Prize (the Berlin Academy of Arts)
2002 Georg Büchner Prize
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
May 22, 2023
Wolfgang Hilbig's The Sleep of the Righteous was one of my discoveries of 2016, my review , its powerful prose reminiscent of Krasznahorkai at his strongest.
Old Rendering Plant is similarly striking, but perhaps more allegorical, with nods particularly to the East German stasi but also to the Holocaust. And the prose, in Isabel Fargo Cole's translation, wonderful.
The novel (or perhaps novella - incredibly, given the depth of the work, it is only 110 pages) opens with a self-consciously Proustian recollection of a frequently taken childhood walk, along a brook lined with willows, but with much darker overtones that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways.
I recalled a brook outside town whose current, strangely shimmering, sometimes almost milky, I once followed for miles all autumn or longer, if only hoping to emerge one day from a territory confined, I’ll admit it at last, by my own weariness. And I followed this path as though to the beat of silent wings; when darkness fell, I’d begin to expect some horror, a bloodcurdling cry perhaps, followed by silence ... but nothing came, the hush beyond the town and woods was the ceaseless presence of little noises.
His walk was also bounded by the embankment of a coal train line [ ...] at first glance the impression was of a random mound of earth, but on closer inspection one made out decayed fragments of concrete foundations, completely overgrown by shrubs and grass, evidently flooded with coal from toppled wagons and mixed with debris from the crumbling pavement: here a roadway had clearly led up the tracks. I called this rotting concrete foundation, strikingly out of place in the grassy basin, the ramp
[...]
It seemed to me some other memory, a memory of much earlier origins, that made me call the bridge’s concrete base a ramp ... and the sound of the word ramp contained, to my ear, some of the indeterminate intensity with which certain severely tarnished terms struggled for more frequent usage: a comparable example was homeland, on which one set foot as on a train platform, with a sense that nothing bad should be associated with it.
The reference to the ramp - and the presence of the railroad - perhaps needing no comment, and indeed Hilbig's text never makes any analogy explicit.
On one visit there he slipped from the embankment and: I fell several yards into the silence, fortunately landing on the grass, which grew amid the ruined industrial complexes where I played. It was not the incalculable level of my fall that terrified me but the idea of the clump of matter, invisible in the dusk, on whose slimy stickiness I’d lost my footing and helplessly slipped.
Later that night after a tortured dream of hidden voices and other horrors no sooner had I arisen than my mind faltered as I saw my right leg, my entire calf, covered by a dry mire, a black-green slurry mixed with blood
And beyond the railway line, the willows give way to tall, bare poplars and a border region which the narrator associates with people who go missing or disappear (or are disappeared?):
Beyond the tracks of the coal line, to the southeast of a half-deserted village, deep in that wild basin, right behind a rotten fence, began the zone that was the east, and you could not enter this region unpunished. You could not return unpunished to the womb. Everyone knew that people vanished there.
(Later the narrator talks of names that had been deported because of certain interchangeable attributes [...] descriptions that made you end up under the roof of a cattle car)
The time of the narrator's recollection and his age becomes, if anything, more unclear and fractures as the narration progresses, as does what he is recalling from life and what from dreams. Most strikingly, on page 23, he unlocks the door of the family house with the key I’d carried for twenty-five years. Later he refers to having made the trip along the river for decades, and at another point he appears to be a school-leaver entering employment.
Then language too fractures:
The relevant nouns at my command proved again and again to be treacherous tools, perpetually demonstrating the impotence of all descriptions
and
Perhaps what I walked on couldn’t even be called earth, this matter that buckled beneath my steps and sometimes seemed to sigh from its depths with a hollow reverberation. Hadn’t the term earth simply arisen solely on the basis of an embarrassed convention, wasn’t it a noun that passed in silence over matter’s true nature ...? Wasn’t the use of substantive nouns nearly always a silence about the true substances of things - and wasn’t that silence so essential to us that it became the basic material of our thinking? What were we really passing over: over silenced things, over vanished things, over the basic substance of ourselves, over the silence in our thoughts?
As the narrative reassembles, he focuses on the distinctive smell of the area, a stench which he suggests was another reason for not journeying past the railway line. The milky shimmering of the brook has a rather more sinister origin than the opening, poetic, quote might have suggested:
As a child I knew it was the smell of the milk-colored current that washed down the brook, bubbling and steaming like warm soapsuds in the evening. I knew that the smell soaked the banks and seeped under the fields; the mist over the river channel was this smell, and the mist that rose from the topsoil too, infecting everything that grew in the fields, and it rose from the meadows, the grass of the paddocks smelled of the river mist’s cloying essence, the bushes on the banks thrived amid this smell, a smell of flesh . . . old, useless flesh relinquished to the waters, washed its smell through the land to the east, I knew this as a child. Tallow sheathed the snarls of grass on the brook’s edge, ancient fat clung indelibly to the slopes of the embankment; it was a brew of rancid fatback, even covering the paths, boiled-out horns, bones cooked to the point of disintegration
and even the willows that bend into the river feed, in his recollection, on the flesh in the water:
And I could not go too close to the old willows that sweated out the oil of the meats they fed upon… I could not impinge on the circle of their immoderate metabolism, I could not touch them, the old renderer’s willows leaking phosphorescent ptomaine from the lancets of their leaves, for they thrived without letup, the death of the fauna had made them grow strong, potent enough to overwinter in their black-green luster. While all the other plants along the watercourse looked sickly and surfeited—all the vegetation struck me as corpulent and phlegmatic, overfertilized and overbred, its natural processes strangely retarded in the fall, when all foliage looked fatter than usual and seemed to eat its way rampantly onward, though its dark green looked dull and unclean, so that I expected to see it collapse at any moment—I thought I could see the willows devolving into hitherto unknown wildness: in the twilight, when the mist rose ever denser from the bank, they seemed transformed into fantastic creatures, the spawn of a freakishly fertile subsoil, ugly crippled excrescences that through their very degeneration had come into power and evil.
At this point, around halfway through the novel, he attains adulthood, or perhaps more accurately, his thoughts move from the imaginings of childhood to adult reality. The magic lantern in this passage, of course, an explicit nod to Proust:
Now the night was past, and I could stop speaking in the childlike falsetto; freed from that existence that had lasted twenty or thirty years, it was time for me to enter through their decrepit doors as a man in the prime of his life.
[..] destroyed was the magic lantern...
Revisiting the area, he see a loading bay and a bustle of shadowy uniforms, dragging the creatures from the gaping hold of a filthy cattle car, with commands shouted in strained voices but this isn't what one may fear, but rather the rendering plant of the novel's title, dubbed Germania II by the locals, which produces tallow, for soap, from animal carcasses.
He decides to befriend the workers at the plant, shunned by polite society, men you could tell by the unmistakable smell of the firm that they could never wash away, and here (for all the WW2 references I have inferred) Hilbig's real allegory becomes clearer - the firm being the Stasi, the rotten corrupting smell that plagues the area the impact of the culture of informers on everyday life.
Then one day - as with the GDR - the rendering plant simply vanishes from the face of the earth:
One night the earth had gaped open and with a terrible din wiped from its face those old sections of the plant that still operated, hectic and light-shy amid the stronghold of the ruins.
And at the end the prose again fractures to the extent it turns decidely Joycean - indeed at one point there is a direct quote from Finnegans Wake (oystrygods gaggin fishygods):
Old rendering plant, starry-studded riverround. Old rendery beneath the roofs of baffled thoughts, baffled clatter of old-proved thoughts, old pretendery. Thoughts thought by night, star-studded: old clattery, the constellations covered. And clouds, old noise: smoke-brain behind the cloud-brow, windy roof of cloud racks covering the stars. But below is the fishes’ winding light: like star-script, winding, fallen chirring from the air.
Stunning!
Three excellent reviews:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/old-...
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/10/...
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/book...
Old Rendering Plant is similarly striking, but perhaps more allegorical, with nods particularly to the East German stasi but also to the Holocaust. And the prose, in Isabel Fargo Cole's translation, wonderful.
The novel (or perhaps novella - incredibly, given the depth of the work, it is only 110 pages) opens with a self-consciously Proustian recollection of a frequently taken childhood walk, along a brook lined with willows, but with much darker overtones that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways.
I recalled a brook outside town whose current, strangely shimmering, sometimes almost milky, I once followed for miles all autumn or longer, if only hoping to emerge one day from a territory confined, I’ll admit it at last, by my own weariness. And I followed this path as though to the beat of silent wings; when darkness fell, I’d begin to expect some horror, a bloodcurdling cry perhaps, followed by silence ... but nothing came, the hush beyond the town and woods was the ceaseless presence of little noises.
His walk was also bounded by the embankment of a coal train line [ ...] at first glance the impression was of a random mound of earth, but on closer inspection one made out decayed fragments of concrete foundations, completely overgrown by shrubs and grass, evidently flooded with coal from toppled wagons and mixed with debris from the crumbling pavement: here a roadway had clearly led up the tracks. I called this rotting concrete foundation, strikingly out of place in the grassy basin, the ramp
[...]
It seemed to me some other memory, a memory of much earlier origins, that made me call the bridge’s concrete base a ramp ... and the sound of the word ramp contained, to my ear, some of the indeterminate intensity with which certain severely tarnished terms struggled for more frequent usage: a comparable example was homeland, on which one set foot as on a train platform, with a sense that nothing bad should be associated with it.
The reference to the ramp - and the presence of the railroad - perhaps needing no comment, and indeed Hilbig's text never makes any analogy explicit.
On one visit there he slipped from the embankment and: I fell several yards into the silence, fortunately landing on the grass, which grew amid the ruined industrial complexes where I played. It was not the incalculable level of my fall that terrified me but the idea of the clump of matter, invisible in the dusk, on whose slimy stickiness I’d lost my footing and helplessly slipped.
Later that night after a tortured dream of hidden voices and other horrors no sooner had I arisen than my mind faltered as I saw my right leg, my entire calf, covered by a dry mire, a black-green slurry mixed with blood
And beyond the railway line, the willows give way to tall, bare poplars and a border region which the narrator associates with people who go missing or disappear (or are disappeared?):
Beyond the tracks of the coal line, to the southeast of a half-deserted village, deep in that wild basin, right behind a rotten fence, began the zone that was the east, and you could not enter this region unpunished. You could not return unpunished to the womb. Everyone knew that people vanished there.
(Later the narrator talks of names that had been deported because of certain interchangeable attributes [...] descriptions that made you end up under the roof of a cattle car)
The time of the narrator's recollection and his age becomes, if anything, more unclear and fractures as the narration progresses, as does what he is recalling from life and what from dreams. Most strikingly, on page 23, he unlocks the door of the family house with the key I’d carried for twenty-five years. Later he refers to having made the trip along the river for decades, and at another point he appears to be a school-leaver entering employment.
Then language too fractures:
The relevant nouns at my command proved again and again to be treacherous tools, perpetually demonstrating the impotence of all descriptions
and
Perhaps what I walked on couldn’t even be called earth, this matter that buckled beneath my steps and sometimes seemed to sigh from its depths with a hollow reverberation. Hadn’t the term earth simply arisen solely on the basis of an embarrassed convention, wasn’t it a noun that passed in silence over matter’s true nature ...? Wasn’t the use of substantive nouns nearly always a silence about the true substances of things - and wasn’t that silence so essential to us that it became the basic material of our thinking? What were we really passing over: over silenced things, over vanished things, over the basic substance of ourselves, over the silence in our thoughts?
As the narrative reassembles, he focuses on the distinctive smell of the area, a stench which he suggests was another reason for not journeying past the railway line. The milky shimmering of the brook has a rather more sinister origin than the opening, poetic, quote might have suggested:
As a child I knew it was the smell of the milk-colored current that washed down the brook, bubbling and steaming like warm soapsuds in the evening. I knew that the smell soaked the banks and seeped under the fields; the mist over the river channel was this smell, and the mist that rose from the topsoil too, infecting everything that grew in the fields, and it rose from the meadows, the grass of the paddocks smelled of the river mist’s cloying essence, the bushes on the banks thrived amid this smell, a smell of flesh . . . old, useless flesh relinquished to the waters, washed its smell through the land to the east, I knew this as a child. Tallow sheathed the snarls of grass on the brook’s edge, ancient fat clung indelibly to the slopes of the embankment; it was a brew of rancid fatback, even covering the paths, boiled-out horns, bones cooked to the point of disintegration
and even the willows that bend into the river feed, in his recollection, on the flesh in the water:
And I could not go too close to the old willows that sweated out the oil of the meats they fed upon… I could not impinge on the circle of their immoderate metabolism, I could not touch them, the old renderer’s willows leaking phosphorescent ptomaine from the lancets of their leaves, for they thrived without letup, the death of the fauna had made them grow strong, potent enough to overwinter in their black-green luster. While all the other plants along the watercourse looked sickly and surfeited—all the vegetation struck me as corpulent and phlegmatic, overfertilized and overbred, its natural processes strangely retarded in the fall, when all foliage looked fatter than usual and seemed to eat its way rampantly onward, though its dark green looked dull and unclean, so that I expected to see it collapse at any moment—I thought I could see the willows devolving into hitherto unknown wildness: in the twilight, when the mist rose ever denser from the bank, they seemed transformed into fantastic creatures, the spawn of a freakishly fertile subsoil, ugly crippled excrescences that through their very degeneration had come into power and evil.
At this point, around halfway through the novel, he attains adulthood, or perhaps more accurately, his thoughts move from the imaginings of childhood to adult reality. The magic lantern in this passage, of course, an explicit nod to Proust:
Now the night was past, and I could stop speaking in the childlike falsetto; freed from that existence that had lasted twenty or thirty years, it was time for me to enter through their decrepit doors as a man in the prime of his life.
[..] destroyed was the magic lantern...
Revisiting the area, he see a loading bay and a bustle of shadowy uniforms, dragging the creatures from the gaping hold of a filthy cattle car, with commands shouted in strained voices but this isn't what one may fear, but rather the rendering plant of the novel's title, dubbed Germania II by the locals, which produces tallow, for soap, from animal carcasses.
He decides to befriend the workers at the plant, shunned by polite society, men you could tell by the unmistakable smell of the firm that they could never wash away, and here (for all the WW2 references I have inferred) Hilbig's real allegory becomes clearer - the firm being the Stasi, the rotten corrupting smell that plagues the area the impact of the culture of informers on everyday life.
Then one day - as with the GDR - the rendering plant simply vanishes from the face of the earth:
One night the earth had gaped open and with a terrible din wiped from its face those old sections of the plant that still operated, hectic and light-shy amid the stronghold of the ruins.
And at the end the prose again fractures to the extent it turns decidely Joycean - indeed at one point there is a direct quote from Finnegans Wake (oystrygods gaggin fishygods):
Old rendering plant, starry-studded riverround. Old rendery beneath the roofs of baffled thoughts, baffled clatter of old-proved thoughts, old pretendery. Thoughts thought by night, star-studded: old clattery, the constellations covered. And clouds, old noise: smoke-brain behind the cloud-brow, windy roof of cloud racks covering the stars. But below is the fishes’ winding light: like star-script, winding, fallen chirring from the air.
Stunning!
Three excellent reviews:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/old-...
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/10/...
https://lostgander.wordpress.com/book...
Read
April 7, 2023Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAOxQ...
May 31, 2025
…I thought it virtually impossible for someone to vanish in this world….as though having reached an understanding that the vanished people had never even existed; when it was said that someone was being sought, this was the final declaration that from that moment on he would never be found.
I read old rendering plant and disgrace by Coetzee during the same week. The awesome and horrible weight of history feels quite overwhelming.
I read old rendering plant and disgrace by Coetzee during the same week. The awesome and horrible weight of history feels quite overwhelming.
November 29, 2017
No one knew well enough what was allowed to be known, and no one knew how to know well enough.Stripped of its context, the quote above could easily describe my own reading experience with this brief, compressed novel by Wolfgang Hilbig. In fact it refers to the stifled atmosphere of secrecy pervading the small town of East Germany where the narrator lives. In a single continuous outflow of long, serpentine sentences, the narrator reaches back through his memory, extracting fragments from his boyhood and young adulthood when he explored the forbidden abandoned industrial areas on the outskirts of his town. The aperture of Hilbig’s focus gradually shrinks to a single abandoned coal factory, since transformed into a plant that slaughters and renders animals into soap.
Silbig's onionskin prose, seamlessly translated into English by Isabel Fargo Cole, peels away as the pages turn, rapidly leading one deeper into the narrator’s nebulous world. His forays to the industrial areas unfold in lush, menacing passages describing the unnatural vegetation along the brook, perverted in its growth by an unstemmed flow of effluent from the plant. The stench is overwhelming, yet he grows used to it, even telling himself "the time would come when at last I could it call it my very own smell." Later he will have two distinct formative encounters with the visceral, olfactory leavings of death. From a very young age he has felt a separation from others, and it is this mixture of fear and fascination with the death-stench that marks this separation. He spends hours alone roaming through these places he has been told not to visit. He is drawn in particular to the gloaming, that time of day before evening falls, "the hour of transition."
Full review here.
December 29, 2020
The eye dilated in horror sees everything. The paranoid mind connects the dead, tough epidermis of the everyday to the monster within, all heat and muscle. This state of mind can only be written in long twisting sentences, each thought an unending convulsion, a written form of Munch’s The Scream, pouring out in waves of nauseous ochre and red. This world can only be seen through the lens of yourself, through the History that created you while devouring everything else, and there’s no escaping it.
January 25, 2018
Ruined post-industrial landforms map the psychosocial history of a malformed society. The direct descriptions here are eerie and compelling, the prose dense and beautiful, and the way Hilbig works his musings and narrative fragments back and forth through time directly into the pitted ground he stumbles across really appeals to my sensibilities. I'd like to wander these horrid landscapes myself, they are the ones that underscore modern reality all too well. Sort of Robert Walser's The Walk imbued with an awestuck horror of the places and world it explores.
November 19, 2017
I'm biased in Hilbig's favor, and this gave me everything I expected: complexity of form, attention to detail in the sentences, an intelligent approach to the past's influence on the present. I've read the three novels of his available in English, and certainly not in the right order; this is the place to start.
January 2, 2022
Ein düsterer Text von großer Eindringlichkeit. Die Beschreibung von Landschaft und Seele fließt wie selbstverständlich ineinander und erzählt die Geschichte einer Region. Ein zauberhaft poetisches Kunstwerk.
April 10, 2021
Heerlijke roesliteratuur, met een vette knipoog naar de Wake van Jim Jokes. Voor wie zijn novelles graag met een flinke snuif psychedelische prozaïek tot zich neemt.
March 25, 2020
Hot damn! Intense, evocative monologue. Critical review to be published in the fall. Think I'll go back and read it again now. It's that good.
My review of this book originally published at the Quarterly Conversation is reproduced on my blog here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/11/02/lo...
My review of this book originally published at the Quarterly Conversation is reproduced on my blog here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/11/02/lo...
November 26, 2021
You know that feeling you get walking through brownfields, abandoned industrial buildings along the edge of the moorland, an empty mechanical in the early morning? This book is about the creepy, ephemeral atmosphere in those spaces.
The english translation by Isabel Fargo Cole is exquisite and reads at times like prose poetry. In general though this book is not an easy read. Some portions are stream-of-cosciousness, others descriptive nature writings, and others still take on a more standard structure. The themes, time, periods and subject shift within and between paragraph often with run-on sentences. This book is very good for reading out on a hike, all alone, where you can focus on the chilling and wonderous sensations these techniques evoke.
I lost my original review of this book to some caching issue, so apologies for not spending too long trying to remember what I wrote - all my coherent thoughts were in that review, this is just a tribute.
The first half of the book was 5-star for me. In it, our protagonist is a child picking his was along an old trail on the outskirts of his town. The landscape is littered with deep, dark pools betraying the flooded mines that honeycomb the plain. He follows a polluted milky river guarded by willows (hello Algeron Blackwood) and plays amongst the ruins of a coal processing plant. Towards the latter half of the first section, Hilbig also describes something I remember doing as a child - waiting till the streetlights came on before coming home for fear of having wasted the dusk hours. He perfectly captures the anxiety of those moments, the burgeoning creepiness of the night, and standing apart - watching the warm lights within.
At some point the narrative switches from the perspective of a child to that of a teen or possibly adult (I'm not sure if he's 18 or in his 30's - school leave is talked about but so is having traipsed these paths for 30+ years..). He revisits the industrial waste of his childhood and finds the old coal plant has been reoccupied with a new industrial purpose. This second half is more obtuse in its gross subject matter but I found the creepiness less effective overall. Some parts were excellent but this section didn't capture the spirit in the same way that the other one did.
In general this book is short enough that you should pick it up without having to worry about making a big commitment. It should be filed under the genre of 'atmospheric, weird nature writing' - which really is one of the better genres. Highly recommended.
The english translation by Isabel Fargo Cole is exquisite and reads at times like prose poetry. In general though this book is not an easy read. Some portions are stream-of-cosciousness, others descriptive nature writings, and others still take on a more standard structure. The themes, time, periods and subject shift within and between paragraph often with run-on sentences. This book is very good for reading out on a hike, all alone, where you can focus on the chilling and wonderous sensations these techniques evoke.
I lost my original review of this book to some caching issue, so apologies for not spending too long trying to remember what I wrote - all my coherent thoughts were in that review, this is just a tribute.
The first half of the book was 5-star for me. In it, our protagonist is a child picking his was along an old trail on the outskirts of his town. The landscape is littered with deep, dark pools betraying the flooded mines that honeycomb the plain. He follows a polluted milky river guarded by willows (hello Algeron Blackwood) and plays amongst the ruins of a coal processing plant. Towards the latter half of the first section, Hilbig also describes something I remember doing as a child - waiting till the streetlights came on before coming home for fear of having wasted the dusk hours. He perfectly captures the anxiety of those moments, the burgeoning creepiness of the night, and standing apart - watching the warm lights within.
At some point the narrative switches from the perspective of a child to that of a teen or possibly adult (I'm not sure if he's 18 or in his 30's - school leave is talked about but so is having traipsed these paths for 30+ years..). He revisits the industrial waste of his childhood and finds the old coal plant has been reoccupied with a new industrial purpose. This second half is more obtuse in its gross subject matter but I found the creepiness less effective overall. Some parts were excellent but this section didn't capture the spirit in the same way that the other one did.
In general this book is short enough that you should pick it up without having to worry about making a big commitment. It should be filed under the genre of 'atmospheric, weird nature writing' - which really is one of the better genres. Highly recommended.
September 7, 2018
This slim book is best read in one sitting, and at only 109 pages that can be easily planned, also plan on reading it where you can read it aloud or softly to yourself, so maybe not where others can see your lips moving when you read. I try to slow down when I read especially beautiful prose, but with Hilbig’s vivid, engrossing prose I found myself reading aloud and faster, and found myself needing to take a breath. This book is intense.
It seems odd to call this a beautiful book; it oozes slime and dead animal parts, there is a stench in the air, a film on the brook, people vanish and others are shunned, there is decay and darkness, and something ominous pervades our narrators recollections that is never named, but it is beautiful in an awful way.
Reviews say that this is an allegory about the Stasi in E Germany and in fact, Wolfgang Hilbig grew up in Communist GDR and “proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to leave to the west.” It is an affecting book and I highly recommend it.
It seems odd to call this a beautiful book; it oozes slime and dead animal parts, there is a stench in the air, a film on the brook, people vanish and others are shunned, there is decay and darkness, and something ominous pervades our narrators recollections that is never named, but it is beautiful in an awful way.
Reviews say that this is an allegory about the Stasi in E Germany and in fact, Wolfgang Hilbig grew up in Communist GDR and “proved so troublesome to the authorities that in 1985 he was granted permission to leave to the west.” It is an affecting book and I highly recommend it.
November 28, 2020
I loved this, I mean really loved it, especially considering I approached it with so few expectations. This is a dense stream of consciousness narrative, poetic and dream-like with a kinship with industrial decay and nature and a constant undercurrent of elusive menace.
What works so well is the way the narrator slips between describing a vague sensation, a nostalgic memory, a bit of philosophy, a dusky landscape and something so surreal it's only grasped on the edge of sleep. But these disparate elements are brought together so capably in Hilbig's hands they feel wholly inseparable.
One of my favorite and most evocative passages is where the narrator describes the swampy vegetation digesting discarded flesh that flows in the river, taking on its nature, overstuffed and fat with it, and the trees themselves transforming into horrific, vague shapes. Another is his eerie memories of the rendering plant and his attempts to get close to the men who worked there, solitary men who stank of the plant, "they seemed to communicate in animal tongues, fleeing from their own language…and their sounds fled like the dark stumblings of sick animals, fled over bones plowed up from leaden earth."
This book defies easy categorization. It's full of weirdness that borders on the horrific; there's a odd disappearances and a tone of dread. Everything happens in the dark of night or a sort of dim autumnal half-light. But I like that it's so free-spirited, unpredictable and constantly inventive. This won't be to everyone's taste, but Hilbig evokes thoughts and images I only get with the most skilled writers (and this is fairly short). Also, this is "durable" fiction -- something that can be re-read and promises to reveal ever more layers. Finally, I've gotta praise the translation of Isabel Fargo Cole, it is a truly amazing feat with prose this dense.
A poetic reflection on the "circle of life":
It…this essence…had come over a crust of the earth, which was permeated, maybe deep down into unexplored regions, with the substance of its exterminated species. Stratum after stratum, all the species’ decay had covered the earth. Particle by particle, extinct matter had seeped through the planet’s porous mantle to infiltrate the fire-born rock; for eons of past life, death and putrefaction, atom by atom, had claimed Gaea, the mother, and all that sprang from her bosom was saturated with the urine of dead rats. Grass fed on the fluids of nerve-blessed broods that had perished a thousand years ago—after vegetating away their time. Having breathed the last of their plaintive hatred, the vegetating beasts merged with the flora’s shaggy pelt and their chromosomes rose into the plants’ finest points and pollens…the vapor of their essence ascended along the sun’s paths; they were driven once more into the bodies of the beast-shaped clouds, before the storms they abandoned the shadowless azure—and in the evening they rained down like blood upon the earth’s mangy epidermis. Stuff of spiders and birds, stuff of lizards and cats, blood of fish, of wolves, of apes...
Some other excerpts...
In the underbrush by the shore the shadows lay like molten lead as evening came and the hour of transition began to divest all things of their reality. They hid like snipers, evidently prepared in their immobility to winter among the pools of blood the autumn sun had dripped through the crimson-sick chlorophyll; there these soldiers rested, tense in the shadow-hollows of the sand heaps, as branches hung over the glimmer in their scouting eyes, with the barest tremble unmasking them…
So we were not exiles based on some neat, solid idea, but exiles out of instability…out of ineptitude, ignorance, antisocial tendencies; we hadn’t been torn from our roots, we hadn’t lost our rights, we were in exile because we’d never had roots or rights; we’d never even sought to find them, perhaps we constantly sought the world’s most noxious regions in order to rest in our rootlessness; like gray vegetation, feeding on the ground’s nutrients but giving nothing back, we settled in the desolate provinces that were the strongholds of evil, we settled between slag and scrap where we could run riot, rank and uncontested. We had always sought the places of darkness—always the smoke, as others seek the first bright happy memory of childhood—always sought the shunting shadows of transition, ever wary of being recognized, for our lives were but a semilegal affair…and we sought out the most wretched work, in cellars, cesspits, and shafts, lowly nocturnal tasks; we cleansed the blemishes, we scrubbed the slaughterhouses, we licked clean the word of mouth, and with the looks of thieves we pocketed our wages.
How symbolic that the externally imposed worry about my future should bring me to a place where a once-clean brook became a conduit for indefinable effluents and accompanied my path with the odor of corpses, signaling unmistakably, on into my dazed nocturnal vigils, the end to which I worried.
What works so well is the way the narrator slips between describing a vague sensation, a nostalgic memory, a bit of philosophy, a dusky landscape and something so surreal it's only grasped on the edge of sleep. But these disparate elements are brought together so capably in Hilbig's hands they feel wholly inseparable.
One of my favorite and most evocative passages is where the narrator describes the swampy vegetation digesting discarded flesh that flows in the river, taking on its nature, overstuffed and fat with it, and the trees themselves transforming into horrific, vague shapes. Another is his eerie memories of the rendering plant and his attempts to get close to the men who worked there, solitary men who stank of the plant, "they seemed to communicate in animal tongues, fleeing from their own language…and their sounds fled like the dark stumblings of sick animals, fled over bones plowed up from leaden earth."
This book defies easy categorization. It's full of weirdness that borders on the horrific; there's a odd disappearances and a tone of dread. Everything happens in the dark of night or a sort of dim autumnal half-light. But I like that it's so free-spirited, unpredictable and constantly inventive. This won't be to everyone's taste, but Hilbig evokes thoughts and images I only get with the most skilled writers (and this is fairly short). Also, this is "durable" fiction -- something that can be re-read and promises to reveal ever more layers. Finally, I've gotta praise the translation of Isabel Fargo Cole, it is a truly amazing feat with prose this dense.
A poetic reflection on the "circle of life":
It…this essence…had come over a crust of the earth, which was permeated, maybe deep down into unexplored regions, with the substance of its exterminated species. Stratum after stratum, all the species’ decay had covered the earth. Particle by particle, extinct matter had seeped through the planet’s porous mantle to infiltrate the fire-born rock; for eons of past life, death and putrefaction, atom by atom, had claimed Gaea, the mother, and all that sprang from her bosom was saturated with the urine of dead rats. Grass fed on the fluids of nerve-blessed broods that had perished a thousand years ago—after vegetating away their time. Having breathed the last of their plaintive hatred, the vegetating beasts merged with the flora’s shaggy pelt and their chromosomes rose into the plants’ finest points and pollens…the vapor of their essence ascended along the sun’s paths; they were driven once more into the bodies of the beast-shaped clouds, before the storms they abandoned the shadowless azure—and in the evening they rained down like blood upon the earth’s mangy epidermis. Stuff of spiders and birds, stuff of lizards and cats, blood of fish, of wolves, of apes...
Some other excerpts...
In the underbrush by the shore the shadows lay like molten lead as evening came and the hour of transition began to divest all things of their reality. They hid like snipers, evidently prepared in their immobility to winter among the pools of blood the autumn sun had dripped through the crimson-sick chlorophyll; there these soldiers rested, tense in the shadow-hollows of the sand heaps, as branches hung over the glimmer in their scouting eyes, with the barest tremble unmasking them…
So we were not exiles based on some neat, solid idea, but exiles out of instability…out of ineptitude, ignorance, antisocial tendencies; we hadn’t been torn from our roots, we hadn’t lost our rights, we were in exile because we’d never had roots or rights; we’d never even sought to find them, perhaps we constantly sought the world’s most noxious regions in order to rest in our rootlessness; like gray vegetation, feeding on the ground’s nutrients but giving nothing back, we settled in the desolate provinces that were the strongholds of evil, we settled between slag and scrap where we could run riot, rank and uncontested. We had always sought the places of darkness—always the smoke, as others seek the first bright happy memory of childhood—always sought the shunting shadows of transition, ever wary of being recognized, for our lives were but a semilegal affair…and we sought out the most wretched work, in cellars, cesspits, and shafts, lowly nocturnal tasks; we cleansed the blemishes, we scrubbed the slaughterhouses, we licked clean the word of mouth, and with the looks of thieves we pocketed our wages.
How symbolic that the externally imposed worry about my future should bring me to a place where a once-clean brook became a conduit for indefinable effluents and accompanied my path with the odor of corpses, signaling unmistakably, on into my dazed nocturnal vigils, the end to which I worried.
July 22, 2017
it was the hour when some dark utterance waxed within me, needing no words, no names, no logical thoughts...a language in which the nouns lost their meaning, the language of an awareness that responded only to wordless, fleeting moments, made from the nameless sensations of the breath that quickened my blood or made it pulse more strongly, and slowed my stride or lent it lightness, so that it seemed to vault over imperceptible shifts in the air, or sink through sloping zones of warmth hidden by the haze of the discoloring plain...far more than that, this language was an instinctual response to toppled boundaries, an unthinking grasp of light and dark, a capricious certainty in the soles of my feet when venturing one delicate step from the certain to the uncertain.the third of his books now available in english translation (after the sleep of the righteous and i), wolfgang hilbig's old rendering plant (die weiber, alte abdeckerei, die kunde von den baümen) is a dark tale recalling a dark time. while not all that much happens in the late german author's slim book, hilbig's prose has an atmospheric, undulating quality that carries the tale forth. concerned mostly with memory and the inescapable legacy of time past, old rendering plant is one man's visceral descent into the dreadful milieu and burden of what has been.
so we were not exiles based on some neat, solid idea, but exiles out of instability...out of ineptitude, ignorance, antisocial tendencies; we hadn't been torn from our roots, we hadn't lost our rights; we'd never even sought to find them, perhaps we constantly sought the world's most noxious regions in order to rest in our rootlessness; like gray vegetation, feeding on the ground's nutrients but giving nothing back, we settled in the desolate provinces that were the strongholds of evil, we settled between slag and scrap where we could run riot, rank and uncontested. we had always sought the places of darkness—always the smoke, as others seek the first bright happy memory of childhood—always sought the shunting shadows of transition, ever wary of being recognized, for our lives were but a semilegal affair...and we sought out the most wretched work, in cellars, cesspits, and shafts, lowly nocturnal tasks; we cleansed the blemishes, we scrubbed the slaughterhouses, we licked clean the word of mouth, and with the looks of thieves we pocketed our wages.
*translated from the german by isabel fargo cole (the sleep of the righteous, ungar, fühmann)
January 1, 2019
I can't say much about this now. It hit me pretty hard. I don't think I have ever read anything so dark before. I wish I could read it twice, but I don't think I can face it again right now.
One idea I had towards the end was that the focus was so much on being outside. There is very little having to do with civilization and humane behavior in the book: No intact buildings, nice roads, family, friends, etc. To me this had something to do with how humankind turned its back on civilization during the Holocaust, WWII, and East Berlin.
One idea I had towards the end was that the focus was so much on being outside. There is very little having to do with civilization and humane behavior in the book: No intact buildings, nice roads, family, friends, etc. To me this had something to do with how humankind turned its back on civilization during the Holocaust, WWII, and East Berlin.
March 30, 2023
Had to read the book through twice to get all the allusions, layers, as well as appropriately appreciate the haunting poetic descriptions of ruined landscape, ruined by the greedy machination of men. The hidden violence seeps through the poetry until language becomes inadequate to express the horror. Everything disintegrates - people, metal railway tracks, concrete buildings, the stream, even the land itself which has been riven into forgotten mines which collapse. The language too cannot carry the burden of devastation....
July 25, 2018
There’s a place a couple of miles up one of the valleys formed by the becks towards High Street (here in the Lake District National Park) that I could not get out of my mind when reading this. It’s the ruin of an abandoned stone mine, and just lies peaceful now. Other than myself, less than 10 people may pass all year. It’s off the tracks and paths.
Set in the German Democratic Republic, Hilbig’s writing is more like poetry than a novella, as much as anything I’ve read before. Frequently it conjures up great beauty,
and from time to time, the complete opposite, as the monologue of the narrator becomes increasingly fraught.
The very simple plot (if it’s called that) concerns a young man visiting a rural old building used as an abattoir, that years ago he remembers as a decaying coal plant.
But there are far darker issues that the novel addresses. After it’s years as a mine the shafts have room to spare for the bodies of those whom the succeeding state bureaucrats have displaced or the ‘missing persons’. It is with irony that the mine was called “Germania II”, and even more that the rendering plant is named after it.
It’s a grim allegory with the darkness of Germany’s history at its heart, and how the brutality of war does not simply end with it. The sentences that describe the lingering effects on nature are ones that will stay with me.
Set in the German Democratic Republic, Hilbig’s writing is more like poetry than a novella, as much as anything I’ve read before. Frequently it conjures up great beauty,
...the old river-willows luxuriated in this nourishment; countless bluebottles, ill from overfeeding, dripping like glossy shapes made of wax, skimmed sluggishly through the foam, and this shimmering foam, rapidly turning black spun lazily on the water by the willow’s dangling roots.
and from time to time, the complete opposite, as the monologue of the narrator becomes increasingly fraught.
The very simple plot (if it’s called that) concerns a young man visiting a rural old building used as an abattoir, that years ago he remembers as a decaying coal plant.
But there are far darker issues that the novel addresses. After it’s years as a mine the shafts have room to spare for the bodies of those whom the succeeding state bureaucrats have displaced or the ‘missing persons’. It is with irony that the mine was called “Germania II”, and even more that the rendering plant is named after it.
Like a hotbed of malice and crime afflicting the flesh of this district, one night Germania II and everything in it, alive or already dead, descended straight to Hell. It was as though the earth itself, rising up in one last desperate spasm, had catapulted itself out of a dog-like forbearance, bit open and devoured the glowing ulcer on its skin.
It’s a grim allegory with the darkness of Germany’s history at its heart, and how the brutality of war does not simply end with it. The sentences that describe the lingering effects on nature are ones that will stay with me.
April 17, 2021
Deze novelle is één grote waarschuwing – dat is wat dit relatief korte verhaal boeiend (en weerbarstig) maakt, met een allesdoordringende somberheid als propeller. Hilbig geeft de donkerheid van het leven in zijn tijd, en daarmee de zinloosheid van het bestaan in dat tijdsgewricht vorm. Een onaangename maar al te realistische vorm. Rauw als de oorlogsdreiging zelf, uitzichtloos en duister. Mooi gemaakt. Niet lezen voor het slapengaan, is de aanbeveling.
https://deleesclubvanalles.nl/recensi...
Eén langgerekte nachtmerrie, een tocht door een desolaat en zwaar vervuild landschap maar ook een tocht door de geschiedenis van de mens, de natuur en de aarde zelf. Zeer mooi geschreven, maar soms wat te abstract voor mij.
https://deleesclubvanalles.nl/recensi...
Eén langgerekte nachtmerrie, een tocht door een desolaat en zwaar vervuild landschap maar ook een tocht door de geschiedenis van de mens, de natuur en de aarde zelf. Zeer mooi geschreven, maar soms wat te abstract voor mij.
September 29, 2018
Wow, gorgeous and nightmarish. The prose is so beautiful, I can’t help but marvel at the translation.
April 2, 2022
Sonderbar, alle fast durch die Bank weg positiven Reviews beziehen sich auf die englische Ausgabe. Manchmal ist ja die Übersetzung besser als das Original.
Ich fand die schwurbelnde Sprache, das Dauerraunen ohne Handlung oder Entwicklung vor allen Dingen langweilig. Hilbig gelingt es durchaus Atmosphäre zu erzeugen und in den besten Momenten erinnert die "Alte Abdeckerei" an Kreuders "Gesellschaft vom Dachboden" aber in weiten Teilen wirkt das Werk wie ein nie enden wollender Vorspann zu etwas was dann nicht kommt.
Ich fand die schwurbelnde Sprache, das Dauerraunen ohne Handlung oder Entwicklung vor allen Dingen langweilig. Hilbig gelingt es durchaus Atmosphäre zu erzeugen und in den besten Momenten erinnert die "Alte Abdeckerei" an Kreuders "Gesellschaft vom Dachboden" aber in weiten Teilen wirkt das Werk wie ein nie enden wollender Vorspann zu etwas was dann nicht kommt.
November 2, 2017
More of a prose poem than a novel. It washes over you like a dream; vivid, yet confusing, and often unsettling. I will have to read it again in a few months -- it definitely needs to be read in one sitting, and requires concentration. But it definitely gets under the skin.
January 15, 2020
Deeply atmospheric, meandering, and seeping with the taint of human industry. So goes the earth, the country, the soul.
April 23, 2020
A short, brilliant prose poem on ravages of identity, scars on memory of muted violence, language's inability ( this was done so brilliantly), east vs west Berlin, light vs dark, night vs day, isolation,war crimes,etc.
If there is a single piece of literature that was discussing man's impact to the land/nature (no,not your usual eco lit, this is altogether a different one) in a dooming apocalyptic picture and tone, this would be it. The whole German land is awash with blood and skin of its victims, and that's why the author chose to describe a plant which made soap from animal's body and the remains of it were dripping in the water and the smell and taste of it showed in one's nearby garden's vegetation.
Fractured narratives disrupting the temporal flow makes us wonder when the narrator is a boy,adult and when the plant becomes obsolete (because of depletion of underground coal) and when it is in function, like it happens during his childhood.
Highly reminiscent of Krasznahorkai's style, here is a sample ( it could be really lengthy):
From a distance I saw an expression of resignation in the stubborn folds of their immobile faces, an expression through which nothing seemed to break, except perhaps a wrath so unpredictable that the least trifle could provoke it: for its cause was found not here above, but in the stratum below the surface on which ordinary citizens strode, sure and insensate…whereas these men seemed unable to control their own feet, shambling and stumbling through the petty bourgeois sphere that was accustomed to the light, reeling, circling rather than pressing forward, an inarticulate roaming, as if through tides of indecision, on ground without solidity through which the burden of their gaze dripped downward, and the weight of their knowledge dug into the pavement where their shoes stuck fast in decay, in burning dirt…dug still deeper, down past the echo of their shuffling in sand, down past the sigh of their shambling in slime, while up above their brains expired amid the vagrant clouds…their pupils were dark tears, like eyes of polished ebony, as they descended forever downward after their dull thoughts, as, drinking continuously at their table, they tried to write one of their letters, perhaps intending to quit work at last, scratching awkwardly for hours to form the lines of their antiquated script, nodding ponderously in the wake of their incomprehensible constructions, and ants chased each other on the grubby paper amid the baffled blue words that were nothing but curses. And I saw them give up, chaotic in their retreat, quickly spinning out of control again, confused in their gestures, constantly jolted by desperate horror like dreamers waking to shadowbox, forced to go on flailing at swarms of panic-insects, or to wipe out their names, hands slapping the tabletop. Or I saw them make forlorn, uninterpretable gesticulations, toneless tongues aided by waving hands, gurgling as though calling from out of the water; mollusks of inarticulately drifting in-between phonemes darted out from the silence, through the milky swaths of smoke over the bar tables. In the end they seemed to communicate in animal tongues, fleeing from their own language…and their sounds fled like the dark stumblings of sick animals, fled over bones plowed up from leaden earth. Oh stumbling over mass graves, oh stumbling in pale grass over the mass graves, oh reverberation of the pavement covering the mass graves, oh, in a land pieced together from tracts of mass graves, oh land like a beehive of mass graves, land covering the mass graves with philosophies, risen from the ruins over mass graves, over the mass graves of the dictatorship of the proletariat, over the mass graves of Lenin’s almighty doctrine, oh over the mass graves of “knowledge is power”…oh over the dark unutterable knowledge of all, oh over the grave of the knowledge of the masses, dark stumbling of words and dark fall of dead vowels snatched like stones from their throats, and snatched from the smoke of their earth: vowel-skulls, consonant-bones, carpus-consonants, pelvis-vowels, knuckle-punctuation, organic multiplications, inorganically transmuted when the headings were underlined. And they wandered onward, with dirt under their nails and pockets full of gold teeth. With phrases in their heads like hooks for uprooting trees, with inkblots on their shirtfronts, and bewildered by the last three orthographic reforms, they passed through the realm of the willows, passed under the masks of the willows, under owls and willows, encircled by the night trains’ trajectory, caught in their concentric circles of noise, ghettoized gods, taboo, as certain trees and beasts were taboo in the mantle of their matted bark or pelt…they passed, the vanished: far from me, toward the sallow eastern clouds toward the poplars, ink-birds hanging from the verticals, toward a lifeless village toward a brook past the town toward a strangely shimmering, sometimes almost milky current followed for miles…followed with the long-since crossed-out letters stuffed into the fronts of their shirts, down the brook with those inarticulate fragments of resignation letters, cut off by the bluish blade of a long, straight knife, they passed through the severed terrain of their letters, terrain over which under which there was constant, invisible wandering, onward, martial law of the letters followed now by no one, blitzkrieg commands issued to the hidden long-rotting tin soldiers, firing commands to the spectral armored trains of the lost revolution, cited now by no one, firing commands issued to the conscience, letters in all consciousness and conscience, letters to the willows the elms the poplars the waters, o trees o tree of trees, o great tree grown from the graves for all trees, o great tree named taboo, stretching over the fields, reaching over the waters, casting shadows over the towns, shadow-casting over the ants cited between the characters…shadow-casting over the white letters, over the white letters to the conscious and unconscious over the letters to the conscience over the witnesses’ letters…letters filled with citations from oblivion, letters to the fellow travelers and executive committees, letters to the executive committees of the conscience, letters to the guilds of scribes who band together, to the bandaged eyes, to the scribes of stillness, to the officers of their committees, shadow-casting…inscribed stillness, casting shadows, oh great tree named taboo, over the tracts of the living and the dead, their boundaries dissolved. Casting shadows over the white letters in the summer glow, oh over the handkerchiefs of stillness: wave goodbye you outposts and officers: oystrygods gaggin fishygods!
The last three words, I learnt, are from Joyce!
If you love long meandering stream of high pitched fevery recalling of horrors this is your go to book!
If there is a single piece of literature that was discussing man's impact to the land/nature (no,not your usual eco lit, this is altogether a different one) in a dooming apocalyptic picture and tone, this would be it. The whole German land is awash with blood and skin of its victims, and that's why the author chose to describe a plant which made soap from animal's body and the remains of it were dripping in the water and the smell and taste of it showed in one's nearby garden's vegetation.
Fractured narratives disrupting the temporal flow makes us wonder when the narrator is a boy,adult and when the plant becomes obsolete (because of depletion of underground coal) and when it is in function, like it happens during his childhood.
Highly reminiscent of Krasznahorkai's style, here is a sample ( it could be really lengthy):
From a distance I saw an expression of resignation in the stubborn folds of their immobile faces, an expression through which nothing seemed to break, except perhaps a wrath so unpredictable that the least trifle could provoke it: for its cause was found not here above, but in the stratum below the surface on which ordinary citizens strode, sure and insensate…whereas these men seemed unable to control their own feet, shambling and stumbling through the petty bourgeois sphere that was accustomed to the light, reeling, circling rather than pressing forward, an inarticulate roaming, as if through tides of indecision, on ground without solidity through which the burden of their gaze dripped downward, and the weight of their knowledge dug into the pavement where their shoes stuck fast in decay, in burning dirt…dug still deeper, down past the echo of their shuffling in sand, down past the sigh of their shambling in slime, while up above their brains expired amid the vagrant clouds…their pupils were dark tears, like eyes of polished ebony, as they descended forever downward after their dull thoughts, as, drinking continuously at their table, they tried to write one of their letters, perhaps intending to quit work at last, scratching awkwardly for hours to form the lines of their antiquated script, nodding ponderously in the wake of their incomprehensible constructions, and ants chased each other on the grubby paper amid the baffled blue words that were nothing but curses. And I saw them give up, chaotic in their retreat, quickly spinning out of control again, confused in their gestures, constantly jolted by desperate horror like dreamers waking to shadowbox, forced to go on flailing at swarms of panic-insects, or to wipe out their names, hands slapping the tabletop. Or I saw them make forlorn, uninterpretable gesticulations, toneless tongues aided by waving hands, gurgling as though calling from out of the water; mollusks of inarticulately drifting in-between phonemes darted out from the silence, through the milky swaths of smoke over the bar tables. In the end they seemed to communicate in animal tongues, fleeing from their own language…and their sounds fled like the dark stumblings of sick animals, fled over bones plowed up from leaden earth. Oh stumbling over mass graves, oh stumbling in pale grass over the mass graves, oh reverberation of the pavement covering the mass graves, oh, in a land pieced together from tracts of mass graves, oh land like a beehive of mass graves, land covering the mass graves with philosophies, risen from the ruins over mass graves, over the mass graves of the dictatorship of the proletariat, over the mass graves of Lenin’s almighty doctrine, oh over the mass graves of “knowledge is power”…oh over the dark unutterable knowledge of all, oh over the grave of the knowledge of the masses, dark stumbling of words and dark fall of dead vowels snatched like stones from their throats, and snatched from the smoke of their earth: vowel-skulls, consonant-bones, carpus-consonants, pelvis-vowels, knuckle-punctuation, organic multiplications, inorganically transmuted when the headings were underlined. And they wandered onward, with dirt under their nails and pockets full of gold teeth. With phrases in their heads like hooks for uprooting trees, with inkblots on their shirtfronts, and bewildered by the last three orthographic reforms, they passed through the realm of the willows, passed under the masks of the willows, under owls and willows, encircled by the night trains’ trajectory, caught in their concentric circles of noise, ghettoized gods, taboo, as certain trees and beasts were taboo in the mantle of their matted bark or pelt…they passed, the vanished: far from me, toward the sallow eastern clouds toward the poplars, ink-birds hanging from the verticals, toward a lifeless village toward a brook past the town toward a strangely shimmering, sometimes almost milky current followed for miles…followed with the long-since crossed-out letters stuffed into the fronts of their shirts, down the brook with those inarticulate fragments of resignation letters, cut off by the bluish blade of a long, straight knife, they passed through the severed terrain of their letters, terrain over which under which there was constant, invisible wandering, onward, martial law of the letters followed now by no one, blitzkrieg commands issued to the hidden long-rotting tin soldiers, firing commands to the spectral armored trains of the lost revolution, cited now by no one, firing commands issued to the conscience, letters in all consciousness and conscience, letters to the willows the elms the poplars the waters, o trees o tree of trees, o great tree grown from the graves for all trees, o great tree named taboo, stretching over the fields, reaching over the waters, casting shadows over the towns, shadow-casting over the ants cited between the characters…shadow-casting over the white letters, over the white letters to the conscious and unconscious over the letters to the conscience over the witnesses’ letters…letters filled with citations from oblivion, letters to the fellow travelers and executive committees, letters to the executive committees of the conscience, letters to the guilds of scribes who band together, to the bandaged eyes, to the scribes of stillness, to the officers of their committees, shadow-casting…inscribed stillness, casting shadows, oh great tree named taboo, over the tracts of the living and the dead, their boundaries dissolved. Casting shadows over the white letters in the summer glow, oh over the handkerchiefs of stillness: wave goodbye you outposts and officers: oystrygods gaggin fishygods!
The last three words, I learnt, are from Joyce!
If you love long meandering stream of high pitched fevery recalling of horrors this is your go to book!
June 22, 2024
The unnamed narrator of Old Rendering Plant is a restless soul, flitting between childhood and adulthood. He's trapped in a town he loathes, yet strangely tethered to it. Even his own family feels distant, a collection of nameless faces glued to radios reporting on the "vanished" – a chilling echo that haunts the narrative.
This boy, drawn by a morbid curiosity that clashes with his fear, ventures out each evening, following a stream that cuts through a decaying industrial wasteland. Each foray pushes him deeper, the encroaching twilight mirroring the darkness within him. He rebels against warnings, drawn to the very things that repel him.
Lies become his currency upon returning home. Punishment and isolation follow, but they hold no sway over his insatiable need to understand and explore. He suffers the lasting effects of this childhood anxiety, his older self burdened with a hyper-awareness of sensations most adults have mercifully forgotten.
Critics scrambled to pin an allegory on Old Rendering Plant, likening its decaying landscape to the demise of totalitarian regimes. Hilbig himself rejected such interpretations. While glimpses of political corruption flicker amidst the industrial decay, the book transcends mere historical metaphor. It's a furious exploration of language's boundaries, a Joycean dance of words that Hilbig undoubtedly relished.
Hilbig's prose is a slow burn, starting intimate and gradually expanding outward. The stream becomes our guide, leading us deeper into the town's secrets. We encounter forgotten industries, the ghosts of workers past, Nazi horrors, all interwoven with the narrator's own experiences. Finally, we reach the heart of darkness: the rendering plant itself. Here, the line between reality and metaphor blurs, leaving us with a haunting vision of apocalyptic destruction.
This boy, drawn by a morbid curiosity that clashes with his fear, ventures out each evening, following a stream that cuts through a decaying industrial wasteland. Each foray pushes him deeper, the encroaching twilight mirroring the darkness within him. He rebels against warnings, drawn to the very things that repel him.
Lies become his currency upon returning home. Punishment and isolation follow, but they hold no sway over his insatiable need to understand and explore. He suffers the lasting effects of this childhood anxiety, his older self burdened with a hyper-awareness of sensations most adults have mercifully forgotten.
Critics scrambled to pin an allegory on Old Rendering Plant, likening its decaying landscape to the demise of totalitarian regimes. Hilbig himself rejected such interpretations. While glimpses of political corruption flicker amidst the industrial decay, the book transcends mere historical metaphor. It's a furious exploration of language's boundaries, a Joycean dance of words that Hilbig undoubtedly relished.
Hilbig's prose is a slow burn, starting intimate and gradually expanding outward. The stream becomes our guide, leading us deeper into the town's secrets. We encounter forgotten industries, the ghosts of workers past, Nazi horrors, all interwoven with the narrator's own experiences. Finally, we reach the heart of darkness: the rendering plant itself. Here, the line between reality and metaphor blurs, leaving us with a haunting vision of apocalyptic destruction.
March 16, 2021
Not since Death in Venice has an author been so expansive about effluvia. This is a really remarkable and unique book.
June 10, 2021
Un trip intense, quoi
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March 31, 2022Gawd, I love shit like this. Gloomy, Central European stream of consciousness forever.
The nature of things in Old Rendering Plant is unclear. This is by design. We simply have a voice and a grim, post-industrial setting. There are only allusions to anything bigger. But when those allusions are to railroad tracks, soap rendered from fat, and an industrial facility named “Germania”... well, there's only one place the imagination goes.
The nature of things in Old Rendering Plant is unclear. This is by design. We simply have a voice and a grim, post-industrial setting. There are only allusions to anything bigger. But when those allusions are to railroad tracks, soap rendered from fat, and an industrial facility named “Germania”... well, there's only one place the imagination goes.
October 24, 2017
Old Rendering Plant, Wolfgang Hilbig’s allegorical novel about East Germany and the Stasi, begins benignly with its nameless narrator recalling the times as a boy when he would explore the forest at the edge of his small town. The book opens with “I recalled a brook outside town whose current, strangely shimmering, sometimes almost milky, I once followed for miles all autumn or longer” and the boy proceeds to do what many boys have done over the ages. He explores the brook and follows it as far as a high railway embankment. He plays warrior, brandishing sabers made from sticks. He’s alert to the flora and fauna and the traces of an old watermill, hidden by dense brush and a rickety old fence. It’s a place for the imagination to roam. In the forest he sometimes experiences a sense of vertigo and “the distant, skyward-flickering din of expanding infinitude.” The forest is also the place where he starts to grasp the inadequacies of language—and the first hints that language can be dangerous. “The relevant nouns at my command proved again and again to be treacherous tools, perpetually demonstrating the impotence of all descriptions…compared to the nuances of the visible they seemed, at best, to be sketchy information.”
But one day he becomes aware of a stench that originates beyond the railroad embankment, a stench which, for years, he had somehow been able to ignore. But eventually he realizes it was everywhere. Malodorous smells seep up from the ground and the brook is befouled. The stench emanates from an old rendering plant, which the narrator learns is called Germania II and which Hilbig uses to represent East Germany’s repressive Stasi and its broad network of informers. Germania II is a “toxic organism,” a nightmarish facility that “breathed and throbbed.” There, apparently, animals are butchered and are somehow purified and made into soap. In local bars, the narrator grimly observes some of the workers from the plant.
The narrator’s innocent childhood idyll ultimately turns into an apocalyptic vision when the old rendering factory is swallowed up by the earth in a violent and fiery collapse, which Hilbig describes in language reminiscent of the Book of Revelations. Hilbig’s wild and protean prose is utterly haunting. Despite being about a rancid and insidious police state, the writing of Old Rendering Plant is infused with an unexpected, surreal sense of joy.
See a longer review at my blog
But one day he becomes aware of a stench that originates beyond the railroad embankment, a stench which, for years, he had somehow been able to ignore. But eventually he realizes it was everywhere. Malodorous smells seep up from the ground and the brook is befouled. The stench emanates from an old rendering plant, which the narrator learns is called Germania II and which Hilbig uses to represent East Germany’s repressive Stasi and its broad network of informers. Germania II is a “toxic organism,” a nightmarish facility that “breathed and throbbed.” There, apparently, animals are butchered and are somehow purified and made into soap. In local bars, the narrator grimly observes some of the workers from the plant.
The narrator’s innocent childhood idyll ultimately turns into an apocalyptic vision when the old rendering factory is swallowed up by the earth in a violent and fiery collapse, which Hilbig describes in language reminiscent of the Book of Revelations. Hilbig’s wild and protean prose is utterly haunting. Despite being about a rancid and insidious police state, the writing of Old Rendering Plant is infused with an unexpected, surreal sense of joy.
See a longer review at my blog
February 10, 2019
Spectacular prose that runs 109 pages without pause. It's quite beautiful and one could read it in one setting but I felt I had to emerge from the ooze, fat and milky water for air. It was an interesting book, if not super engaging. It goes rather like this sample sentence:
"And whenever, afterward, I bent over the page to befoul it with ink, I felt the plains gape open…and I heard the bleached, milled-flat cellulose rustle like foam in crackling resistance to my thoughts, and over the gray paper an empty early day grew bright, whose inevitability I sought to hide with dark blue worlds…and the plains gaped, sighing, and drank in the shadows, the shadows’ residues that fell into the rivers, soapy ash drifted at the bottom of the rivers, drifted, drifted, inarticulate ashen ramblings at the bottom of the waters, wandering over the floor of the forests, ash of the stuff of the organisms, with the voices of the organisms, with the sighing and panting of all creatures, ash roaming the weary plains and trickling in quakes like the hollow impact of buckling front legs breaking through the forest floor…and sometimes the grinding teeth and the moaning of all creatures, finding no place on the paper, where it was too bright, too bright for the humus of outlying places…too bright for the dark in which the creaking of dead branches resounded like an echo, too bright for the silently listening dark that huddled in the thickets, too bright for me and for the voices of a vanished species."
"And whenever, afterward, I bent over the page to befoul it with ink, I felt the plains gape open…and I heard the bleached, milled-flat cellulose rustle like foam in crackling resistance to my thoughts, and over the gray paper an empty early day grew bright, whose inevitability I sought to hide with dark blue worlds…and the plains gaped, sighing, and drank in the shadows, the shadows’ residues that fell into the rivers, soapy ash drifted at the bottom of the rivers, drifted, drifted, inarticulate ashen ramblings at the bottom of the waters, wandering over the floor of the forests, ash of the stuff of the organisms, with the voices of the organisms, with the sighing and panting of all creatures, ash roaming the weary plains and trickling in quakes like the hollow impact of buckling front legs breaking through the forest floor…and sometimes the grinding teeth and the moaning of all creatures, finding no place on the paper, where it was too bright, too bright for the humus of outlying places…too bright for the dark in which the creaking of dead branches resounded like an echo, too bright for the silently listening dark that huddled in the thickets, too bright for me and for the voices of a vanished species."
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