**Finally in one volume: the most beautiful poems of Sibylle Berg. For refusing prayers at the dining table, as a gift under the Christmas tree, to read aloud for the dear children in the evening, as a lovely greeting to the ex-boyfriend or the hopefully solo friend. So to speak a bouquet for the most beautiful time of life: always!**

There are things in life that can only be encountered with rhyme. The rapid decline of everything, except oneself, the human being, next to whom you woke up every morning. Dry rain, neon light, necrophilia. Sibylle Berg's poems are songs to the great futility. There is no salvation for the figures they populate. And yet you can't get enough of these times bitter-rousing, sometimes compassionate, but always funny lyrics, whose ballad sound has merciless catchy odd potential.

Poems against the end of the world

Try Praying

Lisa spends her evenings searching outer space for extraterrestrial life. For good reason, because her everyday life on Earth is not pleasant: her parents can hardly be distinguished from the sofa cushions, and at school she is a welcome victim for everyone. When a spaceship lands behind the house one night, the extraterrestrial travelling party only takes a brief, disgusted look at Earth and jets off again. Only one remains: Klakalnamanazdt, called Walter for short by Lisa. 
On Walter's planet, people mainly cuddle, play and look after each other. No wonder he finds everything very strange here. Without further ado, he begins to tidy up Lisa's life - until she can cope on our extremely strange planet Earth without the help of other people.

A furiously narrated and heavily illustrated comic novel by Sibylle Berg, one of the most exciting German-language authors of our time.

My Strange Friend Walter deals with important topics such as bullying and friendship and encourages us to take small steps even in difficult situations. Expressive and unusually realised as a comic novel by newcomer illustrator Julius Thesing ("You Don't Look Gay").

### **[Reading sample](https://www.book2look.com/book/9783737372572)**

Book for young people 

My rather strange friend Walter

**The first English translation of iconic Swiss-German novelist Sibylle Berg—a ruthless indictment of contemporary society and a strikingly creative manifesto for rebellion.**\
\
Rochdale is a town in post-industrial Britain, but it could be anywhere on the digitalized, environmentally-decimated planet: a place devoid of hope, where poverty, violence, and squalor are the near-future consequences of decisions being made at this very moment. *Grime* is the dazzling multi-voice story of four teenagers haphazardly brought together by individual tragedy and a collective love of grime, the music genre that replaced punk as the sound of the angry and the dispossessed: martial-arts-obsessed Don(atella); Peter, a traumatized Polish boy; Karen, a tech-savvy girl with albinism; and Hannah, an orphan from Liverpool. Despite the increasingly sophisticated workings of an authoritarian surveillance state, the four set out to exact revenge on the people they hold responsible for their misery. But what starts out as a teen hit squad evolves into a makeshift family as the four kids attempt to create a home on the fringes – both physically and mentally – of society.\
\
In this stylistically innovative epic, acclaimed novelist Sibylle Berg addresses the question currently being debated around the world: where will climate change, artificial intelligence, the rise of right-wing populism, and the inexorable expansion of surveillance lead? This masterful dystopian satire is a merciless and surgically-precise evisceration of neoliberalism, and beneath its rage and brutality beats a deeply human heart.\
\
*Grime* spent 25 weeks on European bestseller lists and won the Swiss Book Prize.

### Sibylle Berg, trans. from the German by Tim Mohr.

Swiss German author Berg makes an impressive English language debut with this harrowing dystopian tale, set in a near-future England shortly after the unnamed, newly crowned king resigns the throne, ending the British monarchy. The residents of Rochdale, a “shithole near Manchester,” lead despairing lives rife with financial insecurity and substance abuse. Four local teens—Don, Peter, Karen, and Hannah, all fans of the new music genre Grime—end up as friends despite their disparate backgrounds. The most interesting plot elements concern this budding friend group’s efforts to deal with increasing governmental oppression: the country’s new leaders implement a universal basic income, but that policy begins to erode as how much money one receives from the government becomes tied to how many “social points” citizens accrue. The more social capital one has, the more money one makes, and certain political agitators call for restricting the benefits to the poor or those deemed degenerates. The chaotic and protean nature of Berg’s grim future is conveyed effectively in her clever prose, most notable for the fact that the final sentences of each chapter only end in the beginnings of the following ones. Fans of Orwellian fiction will find this suitably depressing. *Agent: Iris Brandt, Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. (Dec.*[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMDUhwN7x7A)

[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H-W9M_CwU)[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3H-W9M_CwU)[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMDUhwN7x7A)[Book Trailer#1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IJxcXXbcS0)

[Book Trailer#2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMDUhwN7x7A)

[Book Trailer #](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0PZM9bSGLI)

### **[ORDER NOW in the USA](https://www.amazon.com/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512/ref=sr_1_1?crid=T0XZG5LCHEQA&keywords=grime&qid=1676122250&sprefix=grime%2Caps%2C215&sr=8-1)**

### **[ORDER NOW in the UK](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg-ebook/dp/B09NTK2956/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MQJY0CSQUAWC&keywords=grime&qid=1676122349&sprefix=grime%2Caps%2C100&sr=8-1)**

### **[ORDER NOW in CANADA](https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512)**

### **[ORDER NOW in AUSTRALIA](https://www.amazon.com.au/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg-ebook/dp/B09NTK2956/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1PZ8YJ9V6C64K&keywords=grime&qid=1676122500&sprefix=grime%2Caps%2C270&sr=8-1)**

### **[ORDER NOW in SWITZERLAND](https://www.orellfuessli.ch/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1062976590)**

### **[ORDER NOW in JAPAN](https://books.rakuten.co.jp/rk/8ead5f11f2f533d099c8c3bd6545a36f/)**

### **[ORDER NOW in CHILE](https://www.buscalibre.cl/libro-grime-libro-en-ingles/9781250796516/p/54020704)**

### **[ORDER NOW in DENMARK](https://www.saxo.com/dk/grime_bog_9781250796516)**

### **[ORDER NOW in GERMANY](https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512/)**

### **[ORDER NOW in NEDERLANDS](https://www.amazon.nl/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_nl_NL=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=1DQ5ZHNA28V1Q&keywords=sibylle+berg+grime&qid=1670489526&sprefix=sibylle+berg+grime%2Caps%2C71&sr=8-1)**

### **[ORDER NOW in INDIA](https://www.amazon.in/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1G42Y999SDLH&keywords=sibylle+berg+grime&qid=1671001642&sprefix=%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-1)**

### **[ORDER NOW in NEW ZEALAND](https://www.amazon.com/Grime-Novel-Sibylle-Berg/dp/1250796512/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37IYG9DL7EIYC&keywords=grime&qid=1676127185&sprefix=grim%2Caps%2C235&sr=8-1)**


In The News

"A book like an explosive device." —Die Zeit

"Watch out, this book bites...an icepick-sharp social commentary." —Tages-Anzeiger

"Combines apocalyptic entertainment with magical indignation about the state of the world." —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung


GRIME

Sibylle Berg‘s first young adult book tells the story of two lonely children in East Germany. Anna (self-description: “I‘m not really anything yet.“) and Max (“I look like something that‘s still in the oven.“) are neighbours. They live in the same GDR housing block, but only meet when Anna‘s mo- ther falls over drunk in the street again and Max rescues her. As Anna‘s snoring mother sleeps it o , the pair decide to escape together. Just anywhere.

In her book, Sibylle Berg brings together things that belong together - fairy tale and coming-of-age novel, satire and romance. Through the al- ternating perspectives of Anna and Max, Berg depicts the hell of normal puberty, with its feelings of abandonment, first love and rst jealousy. Warm-hearted and surreal, tender and grotesque, the book tells of an escape from the double oppression of parents and the state.

This modern fairy tale for young adults is as moving as a David Copper eld story, as subtle as an Oscar Wilde children‘s story, and as precise, striking, and as suddenly insightful as only Berg can be. Congenially illustrated by Rita Ackermann and Andro Wekua.

As ever, Sibylle Berg knows [...] how to dissect every- day life with [...] her wit and observational talent, and how to pack great sparks of truth into small, cutting sen- tences [...].

The lightly written and surprisingly romantic story mixes the unreal with historical events. The result is in- genious and full of humour.

A Fairy Tale For Everyone

A little book of typically Bergian clarity and tenderness.

Did I Ever Tell You...

Western Europe, today: The rich have won. Populism holds sway everywhere. The surveillance state is perfect. Opposition has been abolished, people are petrified in consumerist silence. But not all of them. A few nerds are still awake. And they have a plan.

Sibylle Berg’s new novel takes us deep into a world that is disturbingly similar to our own. The climate has tipped, AI is making more and more people superfluous, refugees are being locked up, homeless people are disappearing without a trace. Markets don’t like democracy, which is why it is being increasingly dismantled – by autocrats, new anti-terrorism laws, and bans on demonstrations. Which we could just as well do without anyway – because what should we protest against? Against everything? Night has fallen on the world; only in one tamper-proof container does light still burn. Here, hackers sit in front of their computers, coding away. And what they unleash step by step is nothing less than a world revolution.

RCE is an incisive analysis of a world devastated by neoliberalism, in which all resistance seems futile. Above all, however, it is a rousing literary blueprint for how it might still be possible to restart Europe. One thing is clear: Only those who are capable of rewriting the system can overthrow it. For now.

[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bluXjRLbf54)[BOOK TRAILER #1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bluXjRLbf54)

[BOOK TRAILER #2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3vtMoi6ph0)

[BOOK TRAILER #3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfmoCiSplH8)

[BOOK TRAILER #4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOAJOcGfT9k)

RCE – RemoteCodeExecution

PREMIO SUIZO DEL LIBRO 2019 GRAN PREMIO SUIZO DE LITERATURA 2020 Occidente ha dejado atrás su momento álgido; crece el paro juvenil, casi se ha culminado la privatización del Estado y la dictadura de la vigilancia se extiende por todas partes. Por el bien de la población. Estamos en Inglaterra o en cualquier otro país del mundo que también esté dividido; la mayoría es cada vez más pobre porque el capital crece por segundos. Cuatro jóvenes de entornos normales, véase, pobres, se han hartado de la realidad de un Estado fallido, de la beneficencia, de la falta de oportunidades, del sintechismo y del miedo a la policía, de la inhumanidad, los drones y una sociedad cada vez más despiadada. Buscan un lugar mejor para vivir que parece desvanecerse incluso antes de que se instalen en él. Esta novela es un viaje por lo absurdo de nuestros tiempos al ritmo de grime, la música de una generación cabreada. Esto no es una distopía. Es nuestra época. Pasen y vean el mundo de "GRM".

### [Booktrailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qL237cLeV8&t=30s)

GRM Brainfuck (Español)

Lost in the present, on the verge of ruin? This book helps!

We are constantly confronted with news from all over the world that we can neither classify nor properly evaluate. And they do not enable us to act. What should we do against the rising fascism? Against melting glaciers? Against surveillance and shortage of housing? Sibylle Berg tries to find out in conversations with scientists.

While working on her novel "GRM", Sibylle Berg spent two years talking to experts from various disciplines - systems biologists, neuropsychologists, cognitive scientists, marine ecologists, conflict and violence researchers. About the state of affairs in their fields. And about ideas for a future that does not look like a nightmare. How to resist slogans that insult the mind? How do we relate to the politics of divide and rule, which seems to be a model of success worldwide? What does the digital revolution mean, and is there actually still hope? This book is the right thing for all those who also ask themselves such questions and want to be better prepared for what is coming.

Conversations with: Lorenz Adlung - Jens Foell - Odile Fillod - Hedwig Richter - Lynn Hersham Leeson - Dirk Helbing - Jutta Weber - Iddo Magen - Valerie M. Hudson - Avi Loeb - Carl Safina - Robert Riener - Wilhelm Heitmeyer - Emilia Zenzile Roig - Rolf Pohl - Eliszabeth Anne Montgomery.

**[Book Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITE5kBpcyw8)**

Conversations with those who know

Nerds save the world

This is a manifesto for fury, for escape, for individual revolt, it is the story of four kids from highly unstable homes in one of the bleakest regions in England, the deindustrialised north-west. Rochdale is a town devoid of hope, a town in which poverty, violence and abuse are part of daily life, a place where kids have to grow up too quickly. The only thing that binds together the angry, martial-arts- obsessed Don(atella); the traumatised Polish boy Peter; the albino girl Karen; and Hannah, an or- phan from Liverpool, is their hatred of their lived reality, their love of grime (or GRM) – the music style that has replaced punk as the music of the angry and dispossessed – and their determination to get revenge on the people responsible for their misery.

Their thirst for revenge leads them to London, where they encounter degenerate conservatives, conspiracy theorists, programmers vacillating between megalomania and impotence, cynical secret agents, Chinese power brokers, algorithms that have developed a life of their own, and multitudes of losers who spend their days reliving their own pathetic pasts by means of virtual reality. But what started out as a hit squad turns into a makeshift family as the four kids attempt, with limited success, to create a home for themselves in an abandoned factory on the city’s outskirts.

Berg imagines post-Brexit Britain, asking the question at the heart of contemporary European society: What will climate change, artificial intelli- gence, the rise of the far-right, and the inexorable expansion of surveillance lead to? GRM Brainfuck explores our near-future and dissects the state of the world. Precisely and relentlessly.

**Welcome to the world of Grime.**

**[Book Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaZo0Kd_9kI&t=67s)**

“Maybe the individual was never important. It just wasn’t quite as obvious as it is now.”

GRM Brainfuck” isn‘t just a dystopia or a novel about so- ciety today. It is a literary emergency operation at the open heart of our present.

GRM - Brainfuck

This collection of updated travel essays is the book of our times. A sad memory of a past when travelling still meant finding yourself in the world, and wasn‘t a mix of humiliating torment and survival training. When we think of Paris today, images of the past still predominate in our minds - there are no armies with machine guns, no Bataclan, no constant abuse of women. We think of streets without homeless pensioners who can‘t be cared for by the so-called welfare state, and without Metros filled with tired people who can‘t afford an apartment in the city anymore.
The stories take place on cruise ships and on the Orient Express, which the author ed after a day, they tell of a friendly kidnapping in Myanmar and of drunken Icelanders. It‘s a shame that travelling is barely any fun any- more - but it‘s good we don‘t have to as long as we have this book.

She is a moralist among contemporaries, a great comedian, a member of a species that cannot go extinct, surrounded by all the other comedians and their constant state of excitable silliness.

The joy of travelling is always on the margins, never in the fulfilment of cliché. The wisdom of the well-travelled is always tied up with Sibylle Berg’s wanderlust.

When We Still Travelled The World

It’s a sad travel book that Sibylle Berg has written here (...) Beautiful, clever, and endlessly melancholy.

Wonderful Years

In an already bizarre environment, in a spot somewhere in the so-called Third World, also known nowadays as a developing country, failed theatre director Rasmus is trying to plant his creative ag in a strange land, in the company of his wife Chloé. Then tragedy strikes: as with many couples who have been together a long time, who have become friends living happily and amicably together, the day comes when everything that seems invulnerable is suddenly questioned.

In the middle of the greatest crisis of Rasmus‘ life (growing old), Chloé meets someone who puts her in what can only be described as an exceptional erotic state. Does a good relationship mean that you‘re never allowed to fall in love again? Never allowed to have sex with anyone else again? Is it really an either/or? Chloé tries to do both - to keep her failed director husband and yet live out her new passion until such time as the matter takes care of itself, thanks to the natural abatement of hormonal arousal. Then an absurd scenario unfolds after their return the tropics: the couple live together with the wife‘s lover in an elegant urban concrete apartment. The lover finds some friends outside the supermarket, with whom he likes to sit smoking on the sofa. Rasmus pretends this is a nor- mal situation, while Chloé clings to her self-image of a passionate woman, until the lover then also becomes Rasmus‘ lover. The situation escalates in the quietly absurd manner of a Kaurismäki lm, and the ending remains open - but profoundly tragic.

[The book-trailer on Vimeo.](https://vimeo.com/126787129)

... grotesque and crass and disgusting and disturbing, macabre and funny and close to the bone - in a word: beautiful.

... riddled with evil, sarcastic bon mots, lively wording, and bleak criticism of our culture and of capitalism, all in the unmistakeably radical Sibylle-Berg-style.

France has Michel Houellebecq, we have Sibylle Berg. Love remains the con ict zone.

The Day My Wife Found A Husband

Five million Spiegel readers can't be wrong. And every week, Sibylle Berg has been answering the fundamental questions of life for them. Now she presents her definitive etiquette and survival primer. Questions you didn't dare ask will finally be answered, and with merciless honesty: "Is it still cool to visit Provence?" "Can I still wear my hair open and long at 46?" "Why do women take their clothes off for men's magazines?"

One of the sharpest literary tongues in Germany illuminates some of the most urgent issues of our time - acidly, ironically and unscrupulously. Sibylle Berg's texts will shock, mesmerize, and make you think.

How Am I Supposed To Stand All This?

A human life. From birth to death. Maybe something will happen in the short period of our existence that will one day appear in the margins of a history book. Maybe it will even take up a whole page - though nothing else will be left of us.

Toto is born in East Germany. A strange unwanted child, unloved and mocked, he flees to the West and dies in Paris, sometime in the near future. Toto is a hermaphrodite, first a man and then a woman, and he/she questions both our gender stereotypes and everything that we think we know about the psyche of the humiliated: being rejected, not being loved, getting

sacked, getting beaten, as well as sickness, weakness, and loss. Toto knows right to the end that she is only one particle among billions, and that life is a miracle. She watches the world in wonder, and it seems a place full of brutality and hate. Toto doesn‘t defend herself, doesn‘t complain, and her life ends - with none of her dreams ful lled, and never having been loved - and yet still happy.

Toto is a monument to all the people on the margins of society, all the outsiders, the sick, the too fat, the too thin, the homosexuals, those who have to justify being who they are and loving who they love.

**[Book Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SZHcr6MRug)**

In almost every chapter, at least one line shines out that is so amazing and surreal and at the same time of a special tenderness (…) an intensity emanates from the images of Berg's scenarios that defy comparison in all their harshness and obscure beauty.

Thank You For This Life is a furiously-written plea for otherness.

Sibylle Berg sorts out good from evil, just before the final capitalist judgement. This isn't a novel, it's a manifesto.

Berg writes wittily about the sad lives of people, movingly about their desolate existence, and aggressively and lovingly about a bleak world.

Thank You For This Life

A woman of a certain age finds a man while she‘s not looking for one. She finds in him everything she‘d never considered to be a part of love before - family, a companion who will stand with her against the world. Great love is a lot less anxious and stressful than what most people have come to expect from lms and books. It is quiet and warm, it‘s cheerful, doesn‘t ask any questions, and it knows no insecurities. Then, on a holiday together that both were reluctant to go on, that thing happens which most people fear the most: the partner vanishes. From one moment to the next, the man, who was the whole world to her, is gone.

The pair had just now been holding each other, breathing together, looking at each other, knowing that they would never lose one another, and then this happens - and it‘s a kind of death for the one left behind. On an island o Hong Kong, the woman goes through all the stages of loss: the inability to accept, the angry search, the despair, the rage, and the utter helplessness. The Man Sleeps is a musical score rendered as literature. Warmth and devotion, loss and despair, is rendered as a melody that leaves readers shattered and speechless before being ung back into their own lives. After the book was published, many readers wrote to the author of how the book had suddenly made them reassess their own love. It caused marriages, but also break-ups, for after reading the novel, people were left with a great sense of yearning - for their own partner, or a new one.

An appeal for more stoicism in love and less avarice in life, dressed in gently melancholic, moderately malicious images.

More than just the story of two people searching for happiness - and actually finding it. Sibylle Berg finds new, quieter tones.

## Reviews

### Die Zeit, 2010

In Sibylle Berg’s novel, Man, Asleep (Der Mann schläft) she cloaks her yearning for beauty and goodness, kindness and humanity in soft, melancholic, moderately malicious images. The heroine, a nondescript middle-aged woman who earns her living by writing instruction manuals, recognizes, in retrospect, that she has found something precious and lost it again - a special, even odd kind of love. In other words, not "what the French films have shown us, desire, endless nocturnal conversations about feelings, hoping to reawaken passion, sex under rain-drenched street lamps, lots and lots of suffering, and, in the end, silently sitting in a French kitchen. This is not what went missing here, rather it was a love "that was calm and quiet, that was friendly and exuded a certain sweetness.”\
\
The story begins in a vaguely Swiss region, where the world hasn’t yet been destroyed or gone dark, though it is grey, damp and washed out. In any case, as the first chapter title reveals, it was "in the winter back then. Four months ago". And yet, according to the narrator, all was well with the world, because: "Every morning I stood in front of the door and was happy I had survived the night; that all the houses were still where they belonged; and the man lay in bed.”\
\
This slight, modest happiness does not last for long. The story moves back and forth on a fictional timeline between "Back then”. Four years ago," and the changing times of the day—of a certain "today"—through to the "now ', in which the narrator is standing on the dock of a Chinese vacation island, feeling like a " a clump of organic tissue," a toxic orange sunset before her eyes and her brain bathed in French white wine, which helps her to "forget the incredible boredom that comes with trying to get her life in order."\
\
The cause of her misery, "The man”, suddenly disappeared after about three and a half years of living together. During a vacation on the above-mentioned island he does not return from fetching a newspaper. The desperate woman tries to figure out what has happened. She describes the man, explains the nature of their relationship. And since this figure has been created by Berg, she also observes the world and offers a running commentary on it. She reports her encounters with strange and sad individuals, with suicide victims and dysfunctional characters in Europe and China. In each case, "The people had their moments of sweetness, which did not conceal the fact that most of them were overwhelmingly simple-minded and malicious."\
\
An exception was "the man". He was not handsome, not rich, not particularly charming and not a great speaker, but he was devoted to the woman with a wonderful stoic consistency, and he made little noises while he slept, "which were nicer than all the others before him, because the person making them was somebody I liked, and to make noises he had to be alive, to build a tent for me in the night."\
\
Yet, the woman rebelled against the feelings of security he provided; in the first weeks they were together she threw a night lamp at the man, and in the final hours before he disappeared drove him crazy with her bad mood. But in between, before she had the "unfortunate idea" of taking a long journey, her affection was "like a friendly river that occasionally overflowed." The portrayal of that time is full of poetic and bizarre Berg-aperçus that take the clichéd topic of "love" and cast it in a new and oblique light.\
\
Whether the end is good or bad is left for the reader to decide. When some white wine prevents the abandoned protagonist from plunging into the South China Sea, she has a delicate hallucination, which might be seen as a glimmer of hope. In any case, this is the "sweetest" novel Sibylle Berg has written so far – but it still beautifully and powerfully proves her reputation as being the last free radical of contemporary German literature.

### Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2009

This book could be a small masterpiece according to critic Kolja Mensing. Indeed, it is deeply impressive in terms of the tension between the almost cynical, drily evocative language of the first person narrator and the unfulfilled longing for something that she does not believe in, that she found and then lost – namely, love. While certain passages of Sybille Berg’s novel read like a light romantic novel, ultimately, says Lesing, Berg was never so dark and unreconciled as in this book where she depicts “life’s humiliations.”

Love is the capacity to stand each other.

Cynical, melancholy and tender - a brutally honest novel that never lets itself off and maintains a razor-sharp addiction to diagnosis.

The Man Sleeps

We travel, we hunt, we search without finding anything. We‘re tourists. We dive into strange places, surf across decaying surfaces, and we desolate the planet with ourselves. Western tourism is the continuation of colonialism by other means. All the characters in Sibylle Berg‘s travel novel are driven by something. They fly restlessly to exotic places, looking for sex. Or meaning. Or just a change of scene.

We meet Peter, an old hippy who owns a hotel and almost drowns in a tsunami, Miki, an adventurer who ends up in the lm industry, and Parul from Bangladesh, who hammers stone all day to nance her family‘s hut in the slums.

In The Journey, in which Berg‘s style finds its consummation, the fates of her characters come together in the most exotic places around the whole world. A story that ends nowhere except in the loneliness of western tourism.

Sibylle Berg writes on a knife-edge between heart-rending and achingly funny.

Sibylle Berg saves lives with her explosive literary sentences... A cataclysmically brilliant comedian.

The Journey

End Happy has a major aw: the book appeared before terrorism and natural disasters became part of daily life in Europe. It came out too early. End Happy is like a road movie that takes us through an ageing, disappearing paradise, asking a question that has become more urgent than ever: Where can we flee to when our homes are no longer safe?

The heroine of the novel leaves her home. She survives floods, epidemics, unrest, civil wars, then finds companions in suffering and loses them again. She joins a strange sect, observes the end of neo-liberalism before the word has even been invented, and finally she ends a brief respite from the apocalypse - a fragile happy end.

As ever, when Sibylle Berg writes she does it mercilessly and unerringly.

Sibylle Berg opens our eyes - and she's simply indispensable.

Sibylle Berg is one of the few German-speaking authors still worth breaking into a bookshop for.

End Happy

Sibylle Berg is back. As if she had never been away. And she wasn't. She was only in a foreign country: with men. There she saw a lot, experienced a lot, learned a lot. And, as is her way, she shares this generously with her readers. In part more generously than necessary, perhaps: for these short stories, scenes, snapshots are as much fun as the truth. So rather not at all. Good that you can at least laugh about it.


Men's stories

The unpleasant things first

Before Sibylle Berg wrote her first novel, she worked as a columnist and for Allegra, Zeit-Magazin and Stern. "Gold" brings together the pearls of this activity: Travelogues from Vienna, Bangladesh, Weimar and Castrop-Rauxel, portraits of Gerhard Schöder, Haruki Murakami and Phillip Boa, non-fiction prose on the invention of the stocking and talk-show culture, as well as reportage classics such as the visit to the Polish mass murderer Leszek Pekalski. These are joined by prose pieces that were supposed to be published by Spiegel or Suhrkamp Verlag but were never were never allowed to appear. And Ms Berg recalls the most polished passages from passages from reviews that famous critics have given her books. her books. Last but not least, this collection offers the most absurd letters to the author to the author and three Berg poems that have never been printed.

Gold

Real life happens elsewhere, or so people say. Karla, Raul, Anna and Bert look for it everywhere - in the café, at the plastic surgeon's, among call boys. And finally even in America. They live a life they can't really complain about, if it weren't for the constant dreams of that great happiness, of that great love, and that even greater career.

She vividly illustrates the disastrously closely linked tendencies at the end of the 20th century: increasing abstraction of living conditions and at the same time insurmountable physicality.

America

The protagonist of Sibylle Berg‘s second novel wakes up in a nightmare. She can see through walls, and she can see inside people: their thoughts, their secrets, their despair, and their lies. The novel is like an experiment conducted in hell. How can one stand the truth? How can one endure seeing what, for very good reason, is hidden behind walls and cunning, behind politeness and furniture? (What is hidden behind furniture anyway?) All the protagonist can do is try to survive without losing her mind. She travels through an inferno of brutality, malice, helplessness, and grief.

Sex II is like a horror lm on speed that becomes absurdly comic through its apparent exaggerations - yet like all artworks it still falls short of reality. It also gave its author her reputation as one of the blackest and most brutally honest voices of contemporary literature. German critics hated the book, expressing outrage that a woman should dare to write in such a pitiless, almost obscenely masculine tone. But its primarily male readers love the book to this day.

The author writes with impressive consistency about the impossibility of being happy. And she does it in beautiful, clear language.

Finally, here’s the new young German literature we’ve been missing.

These are very quiet, evil, sad stories that make your stomach ip.

Sex 2

Sibylle Berg‘s first book, “A Few People Search For Happiness And Laugh Themselves To Death“, appeared in 1997, not long before the turn of the millennium, and it promptly became a sensation. This episodic novel gave a mute, paralysed era an utterly new voice. Since then, Berg‘s style has become unmistakeable: headstrong and precise, it‘s the sound that a generation of young people and outsiders found themselves in.

The novel is a rondel of despairing, tired western Europeans - a journey through Europe and its prevalent sense of being satiated, but not knowing what with. The novel‘s multi-perspective narrative technique was unique in German literature at the time, offering a new portrayal of loneliness, helplessness, human despair, suicide, anorexia, injury, violence and sex - the characters‘ incapacity to deal with life combined with this utterly new, radically raw style, which rejected superfluity while maintaining a comic edge, has hit a whole generation of readers to this day. The book has since become a fixture of school curriculums in Germany and many other European countries.

Sibylle Berg depicts the nineties as the hour of weak sentiment and barren words. Love and passion, despair and unhappiness have only survived as pitiful echoes or earlier times. While the eighties was a decade of greed that treated emotion as a scarce commodity, the nineties seem to have become an era of apathy in which all ideals have been destroyed, and all illusions burst. And there isn’t much left of language either.

Ein paar Leute... is a novel which sees tragedy as well as beauty in the banalities of everyday life. True feeling is never very far from tackiness, prompting a German reviewer to dismiss Berg’s writing as ‘German trash.’ This it is not, though, for Ein paar Leute... is carried by the author’s sympathy for her characters and their predicament. Not, though, by her sentimentality: of her ten protagonists, Berg dispatches all but one, with no shortage of gruesome detail, the description of which she seems positively to enjoy.

All these stories, sometimes slapstick, sometimes grotesque - and told very coldly and precisely - proceed with an unstoppable mechanism. That is the great quality of this debut - there’s no whinging, and certainly no arm- chair psychology.

A Few People Search For Happiness And Laugh Themselves To Death

The first English translation of iconic Swiss-German novelist Sibylle Berg—a ruthless indictment of contemporary society and a strikingly creative manifesto for rebellion.

Books