Star 111 - Seiler, Lutz

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Résumé :
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.

Sommaire:
A New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2024!

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

A bestseller in Germany and winner of the prestigous Leipzig Prize.

Star 111 (the name of a popular East German transistor radio) begins with the world turned upside down. It is the fall of 1989. The communist government of the GDR is losing its grip on power. Carl Bischoff, a very young man, trained as a bricklayer, now a college student, is abruptly recalled by his parents to the small town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. His hardworking unprotesting parents inform him, that with the border open, they intend to leave the country and check into a West German refugee camp. Will Carl to look after the house and take in the mail? They promise at some point to be in touch.

Deserted by his parents, Carl has no idea what to do. Then he packs the family car and heads to Berlin, where he joins a group of squatters led by a shepherd with a goat. Carl participates in the anarchic life of an anarchist commune, and keeps his distance too. He has all sorts of things to learn about himself and others. He is hungry for sex and love and sometimes simply hungry. He worries about his parents. He wants to be a poet.

Star 111 is a story about unforeseen ends and new beginnings, about different kinds of families, biological and improvised, and one innocent young aspiring poet in pursuit of experience at a moment in history when everything is about to change and nobody knows how. A tender, entrancing, and comic tale of youth and adventure, it is a book that looks back on the history of our time to ask the most fundamental of question: what does it mean to lead a good life?...