A Small Town in Germany : FLOATING IN MY MOTHER’S PALM <i> by Ursula Hegi (Poseidon Press: $17.95; 187 pp.; 0-671-68947-9)</i>

It has become popular to pick Germany as a backdrop for complicated, dense novels or whenever the evil and the dark of human nature is about to be explored. In Ursula Hegi’s stunning new novel, “Floating in My Mother’s Palm,” the German trick works like magic.

Hegi, an awesome word virtuoso, immediately seizes us by the throat, the guts, the heart and pulls us into the rather bizarre world of Hanna Malter, a young girl who lives in a small town called Burgdorf near the Rhine River in postwar Germany.

Her life starts dramatically enough in 1946, after being pronounced dead soon after birth by the sisters of the hospital nearby. Then again, not much is nice or normal in this town, least of all its inhabitants. Behind the orderly, seemingly peaceful facade lurks darkness, horror and shocking twists of fate that somehow reflect the murderous Nazi past that we all know but but no one directly mentions in the book.

Hanna is a sensitive, precocious kid, sharp yet forlorn, and hungry for the love of her very young mother, the town’s slightly scandalous artist who has a reckless streak that Hanna adores. Not only does she chain-smoke and paint pictures in which “the colors aren’t right” in seclusion, she also swims in the nude, and during thunderstorms, whenever she gets a chance. In contrast, her father is a gentle, cautious man, a dentist who fell in love with his wife while filling her teeth and who worries about her unpredictable ways--to no avail: she will die in a car accident.

This book is a collection of loosely connected stories, each revolving about a remarkable character from the village and extraordinary, often eerie events as seen through the eyes of an adolescent girl.

There is Trudi Montag, a short, broad woman whose growth supposedly was stunted when she was dropped by her mother, who then ended up in the insane asylum. She runs the library and is the town’s queen of gossip, complete with the gift of guessing what goes on behind closed doors. She knows that Hanna’s Uncle Hans had leaped from an attic window, that the housekeeper’s son was illegitimate and that Hanna’s mother stopped going to church after her son had died in childbirth. But like all characters in this book, Trudi has had her moment of glory/scandal: Once she was seen at the banks of the river talking to a naked man.

Then there is “Oma,” Hanna’s grandmother, a resilient, once-rebellious philosophy teacher whose leg has been amputated and who gives herself to a healer who saves her life by reaching her soul while touching her skin.

Hegi, a winner of several literary prizes, including four PEN/NEA Fiction Awards, and the author of the novel “Intrusions” and “Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories,” comes up with such vivid images even for small details that the reader feels a jab of recognition: “My mother unlaced my Oma’s left shoe, then exposed her right leg where the shiny layer of skin at the end of the knee stump was drawn together in one puckered knot like an inside-out stocking pulled over a darning egg.”

Klara Brocker, a portly woman with plucked eyebrows, bright lipstick and tight curls, is the housekeeper of the Maiter family. She has a paralyzed mother at home and Rolf, an illegitimate son fathered by an American soldier in the darkness of a damp cellar, next to the potato-bin. Sometimes she sneaks down there, looks at the jars of preserved fruit and vegetables and thinks about the tall, married stranger who now lives in Florida. In Hegi’s impressionistic hands, even tubers come alive; she manages to create a metaphor of lost love, aching desire and hope just by describing the shriveled old potatoes that are replaced by firm, fresh ones each spring.

Another flawed creature is Hanna’s best friend, Renate, a dark girl with a limp as a result of polio. Hanna thinks she’s a Gypsy who was left by the carnival people, because her brother and her mother are blond.

There is Veronika, the frail best friend of Hanna’s mother, who lives in an insane asylum and gorges on food to protect the people she loves, fearing that poison will develop in any food left on the table. Karin Baum, Hanna’s classmate, is pregnant by her grandfather and disappears in “Baby Mansion” to give birth to a beautiful daughter.

Manfred Weiler’s father first dangles his son out the window to force his wife to give him money for alcohol and later hangs himself while she is watching. Hans-Jurgen Braunmeier is an escaped murderer who kills a couple while they are making love in a car and almost is caught by Hanna and Renate, who are told that “you can’t trust people with attached earlobes,” something Hans-Jurgen possesses.

Everybody seems bruised, deformed, injured, tormented. But while Burgdorf seems grounded in mutilation, murder, death and insanity, there’s a streak of black humor as well. One hilarious chapter is titled “Of Weaker Stock,” a wicked story in which the retired butcher, Anton Immers, becomes the victim of his inferiority theory about violets. He has a spectacular collection that he grows himself and for which he wins all possible awards. However, the townspeople suspect that Herr Immers’ violets grow so well only because they are afraid. “If a plant failed to thrive, he’d set it on the ledge outside his window where he’d let it shrivel in the cold air while the elite plants had to witness its slow death.” Soon enough, Immer himself falls sick and is confined to his dark room, where he shrivels and dies.

In sum, this is a book about the strength and tenacity of women--war-women, widows, survivors, who have seen it all and who carry their wounds and scars with dignity. They are the solid rocks, the real architects of the emotional constructions that set the tone after the war; the men are losers, weak and rigid, or at best, boringly kind.

“Floating in My Mother’s Palm” isn’t unified enough to be a novel. Some of the interrelated stories lack tension, suspense. But to read Hegi is a treat, a lesson in linguistic elegance and refinement. Her images are lucid, lyrical and sad. There is something so innocent, old-fashioned and bittersweet about Hanna and her times that it can break your heart.

Hegi--German-born but writing in English--has created an absolutely correct postwar Germany with all its forbidden questions and mysterious behavior, all its squalor, loss and longing. As a native German myself and a child of the 1950s, I felt as if she had abducted me and thrown me back into my own childhood.