
By Hans Erich Nossack
Translated from German through Michael Lebeck
About the Author:
was born in 1901 in Hamburg. He studied legislations and philosophy
at the collage of Jena; he then labored in a manufacturing unit, as a
journalist, and later in his father’s import-export enterprise. In 1933,
with his first publication nearing e-book, the Nazis prohibited
him from publishing altogether, and in 1943 all his manuscripts
were burned in the course of an air raid on Hamburg. seeing that the struggle he
has been publishing regularly: novels, tales, and performs.
In 1948 Jean-Paul Sartre known as him “the so much attention-grabbing
contemporary German writer,” and so much of his works have
appeared in translation in France. Nossack gained the Buchner
Prize in 1961 and lately held the chair for Poetics at the
Goethe collage in Frankfurt am major. He is a member of
the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, of the unfastened
Academy of Arts in Hamburg, and of the German Academy for
Languages and Letters in Darmstadt.
The very unlikely Proof
Translated by means of Michael Lebeck
This outstanding novel introduces
to American readers a mature novelist
whose eu attractiveness is so excessive
—in Germany he's ranked with Kakfa,
Rilke, and Hesse, in France he's com-
pared to Camus and Sartre—that it truly is
surprising that he should still be nearly
unknown in America.
The most unlikely evidence is a novel in
the shape of a transcript of a homicide
trial, an ordeal guy conducts in his
mind in the course of an insomniac evening, as he
tries to come to phrases with himself
and the plain disappearance of his
wife. The pass judgement on joins the prosecution
in engaging in the interrogation, and
though the defendant ability to be
cooperative, he unearths himself con-
stantly misunderstood, regularly ar-
guing with the courtroom. but via his
testimony the fact approximately his seven-
year marriage is steadily revealed.
Despite the outward trappings of
bourgeois respectability, his lifestyles has
in truth been a sham attended by means of the
constant worry of “the worst.” “Of
death?” the prosecutor asks, considering
he has stuck the defendant in an in-
advertent admission. “No, of life,”
answers the accused.
As in all of Nossack’s paintings, the
basic topics of The most unlikely Proof
are man’s excruciating expertise of
the provisional nature of life,
and the necessity of braveness in the
face of his final aloneness. Writ-
ten with absolute authority, this novel
reads like a nightmarish dream of un-
surpassed purity and good looks