Description: A story writer with dazzling gifts of innovation and imagination, Hoffmann's influence spread to such famous literary successors as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Poe, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Garcia Marquez. Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering "magic realist, " fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states, and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler -- a hypochondriac, antisocial, and moody but brilliant musician. In this astonishing book a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity, and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers that make Hoffmann the greatest of German storytellers.

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