Brigid Brophy said, I've heard, that the two best things in life are sex and the 18th century, not necessarily in that order. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl would be a good example of what she means -- even being about, in a highly imaginative fictional way, an 18th-century person, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, seems to enliven this work in a way that suggests the energy of that period. In the hands of Gert Hofmann, as translated by his son the poet Michael Hofmann, this strange character enters into a strange relationship which beautifully embodies the existence of happiness and the constant possibility that it may happen to any one of us at any time -- and its transient nature, and how something else, something good, can still happen after it ends.

The edition I read is not that pictured but this one from CB Editions in the UK. A reviewer describes the inappropriate nature of the image on the cover pictured, so one would do well to get the plain-brown-wrapper edition from the admirable CB Editions.

Michael Hofmann sees this work as part of a loose trilogy of books about story-telling that came at the end of the writer's life, the other two being The Film Explainer, which I read some years ago and haven't reviewed here yet, and Luck which I've just received. Possible The Film Explainer will require re-reading with Michael Hofmann's thought in mind. ( )