The Living Statue

A Legend

22 October 2024

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Günter Grass (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Description

A newly discovered and translated jewel of a story from the Nobel laureate

At the end of the 1980s, a writer who very much resembles Günter Grass passes through East Germany on a book tour and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor's models to dinner—and they come, not as ghosts, but just as alive as they were in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: she's a living statue. 

As he continues touring around Europe, the writer looks for Uta and her donation basket outside every cathedral he passes. At last, in Frankfurt, he sees her in front of a Deutsche Bank and the two have a meeting with staggering consequences. As Grass said, “on paper everything is possible”, and in this tale he gleefully erases the line between life and death, present and past.

Also By: Michael Hofmann View all by author...

  • Kairos

    Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hofmann

    Paperback, 2024

    Now in paperback, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is a dramatic love story that unfolds as the GDR implodes“an intimate account of obsessive, transgressive passion” (Claire Messud, Harper’s)
  • Kairos

    Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hofmann

    Hardback, 2023

    Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates
  • Pigeons on the Grass

    Wolfgang Koeppen, Michael Hofmann

    Paperback, 2020

    Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
  • Pigeons on the Grass

    Wolfgang Koeppen, Michael Hofmann

    E Book, 2020

    Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann
  • The Lost Writings

    Franz Kafka, Reiner Stach, Michael Hofmann

    Hardback, 2020

    A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann

Paperback

9780811238106

117 x 185 mm • 48 pages

£9.99

Add to Basket