Sometimes I feel like it's not worth trying to read hard novels, and I should just read things I'm comfortable with. Then someone like Hilbig comes along, and reminds me the only novels worth reading, in a very real sense, are the difficult ones. But difficult like his, not other people's.

Step one: find a premise that lets you be meta-literary, but in a way that makes it clear that being meta-literary is really unimportant compared to actual, real, human life. 'I' is about a writer who is kind of sort of employed by the Stasi to spy, particularly on artists and writers. Thinking about literature is important, but not as important as, you know, massive state-sponsored repression.

Step two: find a style that hasn't been done to death, and then do it so well that someone would have to be stupid to copy you. 'I' combines, implausibly, gorgeous, Proustian, descriptive sentences with Celine's broken syntax and constant ellipses. It's not easy reading, but holy hell is it effective.

Step three: be intelligent. Don't just write about the ideas that everyone else is writing about. As you'd expect from a book called 'I,' this is largely about the eponymous informant's sense of self, his subjectivity. Most contemporary writers who have ambitions to write about selfhood and subjectivity will, say, write guff about how narrative helps us to keep your sense of self together, or write guff about how keeping your sense of self together is just an oppression forced on you by the capitalist psychoanalytic international. Hilbig will have none of the former pap--stories, here, are just as effective at undermining the informant's sense of self as others would say they are at building that sense of self up. Nor will he have any of the latter palaver--the disintegration of the self might sound really hip and revolutionary in the capitalist west, but in fact disintegration is usually the result of external forces. There are some glorious passages in here about what the post-structuralists sounds like, when read in a Western, but totalitarian, society. In short: like twits.

Is it so hard to think about literature, while also thinking about the world, and to have something really smart to say about both, and to say it in a style that's fascinating, original, and suited to the subjects about which you are writing?

Yeah, it is. Really freaking hard. But Hilbig does it. ( )