Brimful with love, nature, energy, and intellect: history proved on the pulse and expressed through the heart. A treasure.
Gert Hofmann (1931–1993) was a German writer and educator. He worked for a time for the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in modern German literature and has received many awards, most recently the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1996 for “The Film Explainer.”
Translated by Michael Hofmann
In this beautiful, bittersweet novel, a young boy tries to come to grips with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. Mixing humor and suspense to present a heart-wrenching tale, Luck begins and ends on the same day, the “last day” of the narrator’s childhood as he prepares to leave home with Father. Sister will stay behind; Mother waits for her new man to arrive. “Mother didn’t love Father any more, it had just gradually happened like that,” the narrator tells us. Yet, will they really leave? Beneath this deceptively simple surface, between flashbacks and goodbyes, the anticipation builds as extraordinary depths of emotion and vulnerability unfold with “crystalline transparency” (Chicago Review).
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein – all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg’s real-life romance with “the model of beauty and sweetness,” Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. “The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is nonsense!” says Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of “wrestling with death,” of electricity machines and exploding gases, is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the Stechardess: “Something is found that was lost for a long time.” Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house… and then? Colored with Lichtenberg’s boisterous, enlightening meditations on life, death and everything in-between, this stunning fable-of-awakening was described by The Washington Post as “a quiet and convincing description of human happiness… a fine and original book.”
Brimful with love, nature, energy, and intellect: history proved on the pulse and expressed through the heart. A treasure.
