The Week

»Politics, Europe, the present, everyday life – no one can tell you that it is of no consequence,« the narrator calls out to her friend Constance. Together they are the ›proletarian princesses‹ – »not really textbook examples of princesses. But just you wait, we’ll find our way into the story books.« Together they want to put up resistance. Start a revolt. Write the old fairy tales anew. Because something has gone off the rails: All of a sudden, more and more Mondays are crowding the week. There are giants leaping into reality as if from a horror story. There is Death, who, only just recovering from exhaustion, is becoming more and more of a protagonist. There is an invisible child pleading to be born. There is the most handsome novel in white jeans. High time, then, to overcome powerlessness.

This is a novel about an unusual week in Leipzig, one in which Monday isn’t followed by Tuesday, in which old certainties are lost, and new ways of speaking and acting are tested – through exaggeration, digression, folly and play. It is a lucid commentary on our present, a plea for fun, clever protest and the pursuit of liveliness.

»The stylistically powerful uproar of a woman who dreams of a radically different future but knows that a week is always only followed by the next.« Oliver Jungen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»The Week is a brilliant book that speeds up time, which passes so agonizingly slowly in Germany, with its wit.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Reading this book leads directly to the question of where and how literature places itself in society and how the passage of time can change the reception of political prose.« Carsten Otte, DIE ZEIT

»With this book, Heike Geißler has entered the first rank of East German writers. She has something to say. She does it in a politically provocative yet poetic way. And above all, she does so with a virtuoso mastery of language. Bursting with a desire to create, esprit and ideas that qualify themselves – if only reality was as undogmatic as this book.« Marc Reichwein, Literarische Welt

»Literature comes into its own in this novel because it tells stories and talks about subjects in a way that can only unfold in this medium.« Christian Metz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»This novel captures that certain feeling of Leipzig like no other before it.« Miryam Schellbach, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»[It] is indeed a maifesto. One with a strong sense of literary aesthetics.« Marlen Hobrack, taz. die tageszeitung

»Heike Geißler breathes new life into the genre of the novel« Michael Hametner, der Freitag

»... the author [tries out] strategies of disruption and interweaves critical observations, personal experiences and fantastic elements into a kaleidoscopic structure.« Stafanie Retzlaff, neues deutschland

»Heike Geißler has achieved the feat of writing a novel that is experimental and political at the same time.« Cornelia Geißler, Berliner Zeitung

»Cleverness and wit, poignant satire and deadly seriousness find a reflected and simultaneously playful expression that neither drifts into abstract discourse nor into cheap social criticism or even sentimentality.« Dorothea Dieckmann, Deutschlandfunk

»The Week is a truly accomplished feat.« MDR Kultur

»[The Week bespeaks] boldness, [won‘t] let itself be pigeon-holed and [highlights] late modernity’s society with wit and innovative language.« Björn Hayer, Cicero online