Лучшие книги Герта Хофманна

Six blind beggars in 16th century Flanders--a ragged, profane, and irascible crew--find themselves waking to yet another grim day in the dark. Today, however, something is different. Today these men have an appointment with a painter: they have been hired as models, to pose for Pieter Bruegel's grotesque masterpiece-in-the-making, The Parable of the Blind.

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."

A heartwrenching tale of a family's dissolution told from a child's crystalline perspective. Luck is the beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about a nuclear family living in a small German townwonderfully translated by Gert Hofmann's son, acclaimed translator and poet Michael Hofmann. It begins and ends on the same day, the "last day" of the narrator's childhood as he prepares to leave home with Father, because Mother is waiting for her new man to arrive, and his sister will stay behind. Or will they really leave? Mother sits in her room, squirting herself with perfume. Father endlessly postpones his packing, hoping for a magical conversation that will mend his marriage. His little sister spits on her new dress, and asks....

О жизни старого еврея, профессора Вейльхенфельд в Германии в первые годы прихода нацистов к власти.