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Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, by Gert Hofmann

Translated from the German with an Afterword by Michael Hofmann

From dross to gold, an enchanting tale of love is spun.

"Brimful with love, nature, energy, and intellect: history proved on the pulse and expressed through the heart. A treasure." --Kirkus (starred review)

"Hofmann gives the scientist a delirious, childish glee at the universe's workings, and a sweetness of character that, true to Lichtenberg's biography, eventually wins him the love of a thirteen-year-old beauty." --The New Yorker

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."

GERT HOFMANN (1931-1993), "the most singular writer to come out of Germany since Heinrich Boll" (The Times of London), was born in Limbach, Saxony. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl was the last novel he wrote before his death. MICHAEL HOFMANN, son of Gert Hofmann, was born in Freiburg, West Germany, in 1957. He is a renowned poet, translator, and essayist. New Directions publishes his widely praised translation of Franz Kafka's Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared. Also available by Gert Hofmann from New Directions: Luck; ISBN 0-8112-1502-4. Pbk. (NDP1075)

Date of publication: July 2007