PearlyBooks

Low stock: 1 left

Product Description


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 town:wonderfully 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....


From Publishers Weekly


The late Hofmann (The Parable of the Blind) explores the dissolution of a family from the viewpoint of an adolescent German boy in 1960 in this frank, affecting novel. Mother has asked Father to move out, and the story unfolds over a single morning while the family waits for the moving van that will take Father and the nameless narrator to new lodgings. Trying to gather fragments of his childhood 'so that some of it might stick later,' the boy wanders through the house and around the town with his sister trailing behind, spilling an endless stream of questions in a child's attempt to understand an adult's decision. Stripped, spare prose creates the impression that the boy is merely a detached witness to his parents' separation, but subtle clues belie his neutrality: an almost imperceptible impatience with his bumbling father; a muted desire to be noticed by his self-absorbed mother. As the day progresses, Father, a failed novelist, vacillates between confronting Mother and pretending that nothing is wrong, while Mother preens in a separate bedroom, awaiting the new, steadily employed lover who will take Father's place. As the clock winds down, the boy anxiously waits for a last-minute reprieve from Mother or some show of spirit from Father that will keep the family intact, however unhappy they might be together. While Hofmann's desolate emotional landscapes and darkly comic observations are not for those seeking a literary lark, readers will appreciate his deft handling of the minimalist plot and his authentic rendering of a precociously perceptive boy baffled by his elders.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Review


A grimly comic romp through domestic misery, immensely readable and immensely unsettling. --
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The New Leader

A wonderful book, combining a light touch with underlying pathos, ironic humor with real empathy for heartbreak of ordinary lives. --
Eva Figes, The Guardian

This affecting final novel by Hofmann explores the bitter end of a marriage and a German family's dissolution. --
Ihsan Taylor, New York Times, 9 January 2005

Wonderfully reinforced by the younger Hofmann's attention to his father's work. --
Noah Isenberg, The New York Times Book Review


About the Author


Gert Hofmann (1931-1993) began his career as a prolific author of radio plays. He left Germany in 1951 to teach German literature at universities in Europe and America. He did not become a full-time writer or return to Germany until 1979, when his first prose work was published. Thereafter, he produced a book a year for the rest of his life.