Star 111

Reviews / Votes

'It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment of the Fall of the Berlin Wall the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the "Wenderoman" par excellence, the great novel of the "turn", as German reunification is called.' Christine Lecerf, Le Monde des livres 'The Berlin of Star 111 wakes a longing for a city like no other. You want to linger there in the squatted Assel bar where workers, hookers and departing Soviet soldiers cross paths with anarchists full of ideas.' Frederique Fanchette, Liberation 'The presence of objects have is no doubt one of the most extraordinary things about Star 111. Everything is unique, everything has a price, everything is respected because it is the fruit of work or of making. Nothing is thrown away, everything kept. What if the objects have a soul? Read Star 111 (the title is the name of an East German transistor radio) and understand the real value of an object.' Cecile Dutheil de la Rochere, AOC 'Lutz Seiler reaches the level of a Thomas Pynchon here. This is atmospherically rich, true world literature. World literature is, after all, that which lets me see the world with different eyes, which shows me a part of the world I have not seen before. And this is what Seiler manages to do in Star 111.' Denis Scheck, SWR lesenswert 'Star 111 is a novel full of hard-hitting, deeply moving psychology, full of scenes in which people shake the foundations of a reality that is in the process of creating new laws for itself.' Paul Jandl, Neue Zuercher Zeitung 'The goat in the novel, the reader understands, knows neither longing nor nostalgia. The fact that the novel shares, in this regard, the view of a goat, is its last and biggest virtue.' Thomas Steinfeld, Sueddeutsche Zeitung 'For the second time now Lutz Seiler has achieved something rather extraordinary: to talk about how one actually leads a poetic existence, a matter that is as euphoric as it is cruel, in a novel that is "accessible" in the best sense of the word.' Jan Wiele, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 'Lutz Seiler talks about a city and a time that seemed to have been exhausted in fiction. But he creates a new fascination.' Jona Nietfeld, Der Tagesspiegel 'It has been a long time since anyone has talked about those foggy years, glossed over with garish colours by other writers scores of times, more movingly than Lutz Seiler.' Anja Maier, die tageszeitung 'Seiler tells a story of freedom in a poetically-precise style.' Der Spiegel 'This is much more than a historical novel. It condenses an era and invokes the great panoramas of consciousness of modernity in a highly independent way.' Helmut Boettiger, Deutschlandfunk Kultur 'This unexpected novel about post-reunification from the partially decayed, far from gentrified Berlin convinces with its unique atmospheric density, its gentle irony and the devotion to the matter at hand.' Bayerischer Rundfunk 'With Star 111, Lutz Seiler presents a great novel that talks enchantingly about departures and downfalls, about social utopias and societal realities, about humiliation and pride. Fascinating.' Katja Weise, NDR Kultur 'What distinguishes it from the many Berlin-Reunification-books is that there is not a trace of caricature, no manipulative narrative, but still captivating entertainment.' Roland Gutsch, Nordkurier 'Served by a trio of stellar translators, And Other Stories has done a great service bringing these three works into English. They will allow a new audience to enter Lutz Seiler's haunted world and admire his singular voice in its different refractions.' Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement '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 '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 'A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias.' Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times, Best Books of 2023