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the news from shed 7

John Darnielle — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 15:03:29 GMT

Social media, the thing you should avoid talking about because, and we now have nearly twenty years of data about this, people who start talking about it will never, ever be able to stop, this week delivered up a classic can't-quit-you moment for me. On Bluesky, where even the most optimistic user can't help noticing that the good times are a little harder to come by than they were just last year, I waded into a thread about German cultural output since the Second World War. The initial post from the thread has been deleted, but a poster I like replied: "I'd never thought about this but Germany's modern cultural output really is strikingly low compared to its size and wealth." This immediately activated my "what can we really know about other cultures when so little of their literature gets translated into English" button, which is permanently set to oversensitive, and the thread that followed was a good conversation, of all blessed things: my sense that Americans are generally unreceptive-to-hostile toward foreign cultural production was challenged by examples ranging from K-pop to Elena Ferrante; the massive impact of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder on dance music (which is to say: on music) was noted; and a German poster wrote "[f]or its economic clout and reputation Germany is a surprisingly parochial and - though this is changing - monoethnic country. The introvert among the big Euro nations."

This word "parochial" caught my attention; it's generally a mild pejorative, but I want to push back against that, sometimes: what might the aesthetic advantages of parochialism be? If I replace the word "parochial" with "local" in a sentence, what happens to the meaning of that sentence? When we call something parochial, do we mean that it's insular, limited, restricted – fairly neutral qualities – or do we mean that it's narrow-minded and petty? Pretty clearly we mean the latter, but "local to the parish" is what the word means in its original sense: anything in that? "This word originally meant something other than how we use it now" is only useful as a thought exercise, not a tiresome gotcha, but thought exercises are exactly what interest me, and parishes aren't without their social and personal functions, not all of them nefarious.

Anyhow, in the midst of this conversation a thoughtful person named "the late Wolfgang Hilbig" among contemporary German novelists findable in English translation, and I said to myself, hold up, didn't I almost take a book by that guy out on tour recently? And yes. It was on my shelf still, Under the Neomoon, and I had just finished one book so it was time to pick another; and I took Under the Neomoon down from the shelf.

It's a collection of short stories. I finished it last night; I am still reeling from its effect. It has left a profound impression. Hilbig's narrators and characters have real jobs, mainly in factories, and they navigate their experience of the world and society through, and sometimes at, these jobs. Both the world and the society in which these figures live is in a state of decay – although I spent a fair amount of time fishing around for a better word than "decay" while reading, because I conceive of decay in terms of erosion, dust, dryness that leads to collapse. This isn't that, this isn't any of that. But take "Thirst," four-and-a-half rich pages that begin:

In the evenings, in the summer twilight, with a southwest breeze blowing, all the town's streets fill with the cloying, unendurable smell of cadavers.

(tr. Isabel Fargo Cole, as throughout)

Every term prior to "cloying" seems to be setting up an idyllic scene (indeed, the story that preceded "Thirst" was called "Idyll"); every word after, except "of," subverts the setup. In the story, people drink in pubs to forget the stench of the town; they can't slake their thirst, which "persists independent of all satiation." In one such pub, an onlooker observes a nightmare vision in which "lots and lots of yellow foam-crowned glasses...seem to merge, so that all at once you see them as a single wave of cool, white-yellow beer foam surging toward you," a surge which drenches everything but brings no relief to the drinkers. The dreamlike scene inside the bar grows florid and hermetically dense:

The mouths of the people around you have stretched to foaming flews, swollen to shaggy trunks, lengthened to amphibious bills, all the bodies are a glistening green, covered with silver scales, all the limbs are strong and supple, equipped with splayed webs, dangling fins, fishtails, rhythmically vibrating gills, they're all diving, swimming, gliding creatures, releasing streams of bubbles and touching each other with gaping snouts; it's awful to see their obscene pleasure as they roll over on their backs at the level of the dim lamps and, inert for a time, a mere snuffling their only sign of life, press white-yellow glistening belly against belly.

This is lush writing deployed in the service of a fearful and degraded vision; Hilbig is not the first to employ this inversion, but as the stories follow one another, his singular view of the machines that enable this contrast becomes clearer, and more attractive. He writes about the individual in relation to the state, and about the structures – state apparatus – within which that individual exists: structures prior to which he in many ways does not exist, but whose rickety, portmanteau architectures cannot provide adequate support. At the same time, to cast these tales as the-individual-against-society is an oversimplification: several of them locate the conflict at an earlier location from which redress is impossible – in language – there are several jails among the stories, in which prisoners fairly pointedly serve out their "sentences."

There's little narrative movement; a man goes to work and returns to his home, or goes from office to office at his workplace to get his paycheck; the highest moment of drama, in "He," is an abduction by state actors of a fellow who's been walking through a town, but even there, the only thing that happens is that moment; the story ends:

Once, when the car stopped, motor running as though about to leap forward, there was a din as of great iron gates opening, and then the journey went on, helplessly, swiftly, and maybe for a long, long time.

Over the course of the book, this sense of uncertainty, of mistrust in one's environment despite that environment's richly detailed familiarity, becomes primary: by describing, we define. I don't have a big conclusion, but I did head directly to my shelves as soon as I was done, because I was pretty certain I had another Hilbig book there; and I did; and that's what's next.

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