THE WEST GERMAN NOVELIST AND WRITER of short stories and radio dramas Gert Hofmann states that when reading gets dull, “it's often because the words keep going after it's clear how the sentence ends.” Against this predictability, he has developed an elliptic style, a style that often makes lightning fast changes from indirect to direct speech and from persona to persona. Hofmann calls it “nervous.”

Not an outwardly nervous man, Hofmann does have a certain preoccupation (both in work and in life) with being on the move. Born in the East German province of Saxony in 1931, he emigrated to West Germany while in his twenties to work toward a doctorate in Germanics at the University of Freiburg. Since then, he says, he's always “had one foot in the university,” by which he means universities all over the world.

He has taught one year in France, eight years in Great Britain, one year in Mexico, ten years in Yugoslavia, and two years in the United States (at Berkeley and Yale).

With Hofmann in Oberlin are his wife Eva and ten-year-old daughter Susi. Three older children — one of them pursuing a literary career in England — remain in Europe.

Hofmann's literary interests are commensurately international. He claims William Faulkner, Henry James, and James Joyce as influences in his writing. His collection of novellas, Gespräch über Balzacs Pferd, is inspired by the lives of great authors such as J. M. R. Lenz and Honoré de Balzac.

Hofmann began his career with radio dramas — he estimates that he has written between forty and fifty of them to date. These works have been translated and produced in virtually every part of the world. He has also written stage dramas. One, about the poet Robert Walser, was recently performed in Düsseldorf and Berlin and will be produced in Munich this May.

It wasn't until 1979 that the first prose work by Hofmann, a novel entitled Die Denunziation, appeared. The work was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Since then, Hofmann has received a number of other prestigious prizes — including the Döblin Prize and the Prix Italia — and has published a book every year.