Star 111

by Lutz Seiler Narrated by BJ Harrison

Overview

A bestseller in Germany, a panoramic and picaresque novel of the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, told through the experiences of a young man making his way in a time of constant change.



November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge and Walter, following a secret dream they've harbored all their lives, set out for life in the West.



Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father's car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it's with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all, of poetry.



Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in its original German, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias." —Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times "A Best Book of 2023, Fiction in Translation (UK Edition)

"The fragmentary style of Star 111 recalls much of the later work of Grass [...] The great ingenuity of Seiler’s narrative lies in the displacement that it effects between Carl’s exploits and those of his distant parents, from whom he receives regular letters written in a floridly formal style." —Stuart Walton, The Hong Kong Review of Books

"The author’s shimmering, ironic and musical prose—impeccably translated by Tess Lewis—captures a moment both archaic and profoundly real. Utopian and matter-of-fact, it is both timeless and obsessed with the minutiae of its time." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement

"There aren’t many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement."  —Will Ashon

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192649893
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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