The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

Zacharias Lichter is a vagrant and philosopher with “the fiery personality of one of the last descendants of the ancient race of great prophets” whose tirades and mad beliefs are recorded in C linescu’s Romanian classic, which he began writing in the late 1950s and published in 1969. An iconoclastic treatment of man’s capacity for love and existence itself, C linescu’s book narrowly escaped the Communist censors when first published . Now in English for the first time, it’s stunning that Lichter’s freewheeling discourse on the necessity of revolution, the transience of mortal law, and the importance of sympathy for the worker who constantly sells his powers “at a loss” was allowed to see print in the restrictive climes of midcentury Romania. In a kind of rejoinder to Nietzsche and Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Lichter, the self-described “prophet-clown,” wanders the streets with his only friend, the alcoholic Leopold Nacht. He composes poems, begs for alms, and challenges the prejudices of so-called learned men, whether they be doctors or mathematicians. He defends the lot of thieves and wanderers with madcap takes on Dante, the Greeks, and even God himself. This book-length panegyric from a raving genius is a strange and uncompromised response to modernity run amok. (Mar.)