Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
Lichtenberg in Love
By Gabriele Annan
Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl
by Gert Hofmann,translated from the German and with an afterword by Michael Hofmann
New Directions, 245 pp., $23.95
Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl was first published in 1994—a year after its author, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, died. The translation is by his son, the poet Michael Hofmann, who lives in England and the US and writes in English. You could call it another work of filial piety—along with his translations of Luck and The Film Explainer, the two novels by his father that preceded Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl. All three were written after Gert Hofmann suffered a stroke, which left him unable to read. He dictated them to his wife, and she read the drafts back to him 'to correct and embellish aloud.' The pathos of their collaboration seeps into Gert Hofmann's final novel. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is both funny and sad, with a happy but disillusioned and disillusioning ending.
Review, 2016 words
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