The Shunra and the Schmetterling

Yoel Hoffmann, "Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius" (Forward), undertakes a story strictly from the child's-eye view and creates one of his most beautiful books to date.Shunra is Aramaic for "cat." Schmetterling is German for "butterfly." In Yoel Hoffmann's new book, these and numerous other creatures, cultures, and languages meet in a magical shimmering hymn to childhood. Hoffmann traces his hero's developing consciousness of the ways-and-wonders of the world as though he were peering through a tremendous kaleidoscope: all that was perceived, all that is remembered, is rendered in fluid fragments of color and light. With remarkable delicacy and sweep, Hoffmann captures childhood from the amazed inside out, and without the backward-looking wash of grown-up sentiment. Instead, the boy's deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The Shunra & the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction—a small marvel of a book, and one of the author's finest to date. AUTHOIRBIO: Yoel Hoffmann has been acclaimed as "miraculous" (A. B. Yehoshua), "a reason to celebrate" (Hadassah Magazine), "spectacular" (The New Yorker), "radiant" (World Literature Today), and "stunning" (The New Leader). He is a Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and has had a lifelong engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism.