Not as challenging as Hilbig's 'I,' but just as intelligent, just as well-written, just as well-translated. Where that monster was about living in an authoritarian state/ how you can be a decent human being at any point (i.e., not easily), this looks at the aftermath of trying to live in such a state or trying to be a decent human being, as well as doing a quick bit of "What would Proust be like if set in the DDR?"

If that doesn't get you to read it, well, okay, that would get me to read it. I understand other people have other priorities. ( )

This is an extraordinary, sad work of a kind that could only have been written by a man of Hilbig's unique era: born in 1941, growing up in the rubble of East Germany, and already in late middle age when the Germanies reunified, when he was too old to change much about his life view or habits or to do anything other than chronicle his times with extreme, even painful truthfulness.

I disagree with those who find this work surreal, or who compare it with Kafka or even Poe. Anyone who had the experience of spending any time at all in pre-1989 East Germany would remember how reality itself was surreal, in the DDR. The stories in The Sleep of the Righteous capture the paranoia and the surreal nature of living in that culture of paranoia and defeat.

But this isn't a nihilistic book. It's full of humanity, and that's what makes the tragedy it chronicles so deeply affecting. Every one of these stories is heartbreaking in some way, from the first in the collection, about a boy growing up in a world defined by unexploded ordinance and industrial waste--a world so natural to the boy that he doesn't think to complain--to the last, extraordinary story, narrated by an older man, post-unification, who tells of his chance meeting with the Stasi officer who had been assigned to spy on him for decades.

This is an incredible book. ( )