Manfred: Confession of an Alien

On a day that is far from unclouded in the life of Manfred—a 35-year-old programmer who has slipped a little, isn’t very healthy, is deeply disillusioned and frankly gloomy, in short, a perfectly typical Homo sapiens—an alien arrives named Zorrgh.

Why would a representative of a super-advanced civilization need such an unremarkable Manfred? It turns out that he has triggered an intergalactic distress signal: either Manfred himself or someone close to him has come near the RIGHT THOUGHT—that which is capable of letting people glimpse the fact that alien civilizations exist, even though Earth hasn’t yet ripened for that knowledge. Zorrgh has intervened before, when the dangerous line was being approached by Bosch, Descartes, Ada Lovelace, and Einstein. To bring Manfred to his senses, establish control, study his surroundings, throw off the trail, and quietly disappear—child’s play. But soon the “updated” and, unexpectedly for everyone, noticeably wiser Manfred encounters Sabine again—the first love, a woman who is no simple matter and has her own mission—and then the alien operation, under cover of normality, turns into a raucous farce, dangerous both for life and for sanity.

Thomas Ler is one of the largest and most distinctive figures in contemporary German literature: a programmer and philosopher, a mocker and an erudite scholar, whom critics compare to Thomas Pynchon, while we would more readily place him alongside Jaume Cabré. "Manfred: The Confession of an Alien" is a philosophical novel, half farce: at once satire and parable, a tragicomedy staged on the sawdust of a circus arena. Highly developed civilizations look at comic humanity from the heights of space and burst into helpless laughter—what else is there to do? Better to laugh than to cry.