Peter Handke

By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America--from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, Short Letter, Long Farewell is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life--or the corpse of an old one--lying just around the corner.

Short Letter, Long Farewell

"The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world"."--Global Books in Print.

A Novel

The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

After dining out with her husband to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne realizes that he will someday leave her and that she must learn to fend for herself and her young son now

The Left-handed Woman

A writer, fearful of losing his abilities and hence his connection with the world, takes an afternoon walk and has several encounters that reaffirm his confidence

The Afternoon of a Writer

[Die Angst des Tormanns vorm Elfmeter türk. ] ; Kalecinin penaltı anındaki endişesi : anlat

Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by his latest work. In 1960, Filip Kobal, an alienated, 20-year-old, nascent Austrian writer of Slovenian descent, embarks on a quest to the land of his forebears. Ostensibly a retracing of his much older brother's last steps 20 years before (he was a Slovenian patriot, lover and revivifier of the language and tradition, and a doomed member of the Resistance), the journey is in fact an odyssey of self-discovery for Filip the man and the writer. Handke fashions an extraordinary retelling of the archetypal journey of initiation where the hero must travel beyond the frontiers of the known in order to transform himself into a higher state of being. Using his brother's agricultural student copybook and Slovenian-German dictionary as guides, Filip discovers language's magical ability to expand and transform reality. He attains a transcendent vision in which things and their names are all conjoined and enfolded upon themselves. And with undercurrents of memory of a bloody, oppressive past and consciousness of a sickly political present manifested in its debased, prosaic use of words, Handke reminds us, in crystalline prose, that our speech, our freedom and spiritual wholeness are one.

Repetition

A geologist in Alaska decides he must return home to Europe, a writer explores a mountain painted by Cezanne, and a man and his young daughter work out their own concept of family life

Slow Homecoming

The avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright examines his mother's life, which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy, ending in suicide; while recording his rage over the problems that his mother left for him to solve after her death.

A Life Story

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Çocuğun öyküsü

A woman suddenly announces her break with her husband by saying that she has 'had a strange idea... more like an illumination' Marianne surprises him with a seemingly spontaneous decision: she demands that he should go away and leave her alone with their eight-year-old son. At first, the man accedes to her request without objection; his later somewhat half-hearted attempts to return prove fruitless. It is the beginning of solitude for the woman, the boy and the man. Marianne has given up her everyday life and her security; she sets out carefully and determinedly to lead her own life.

Solak kadın

"An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer from one of Europe's most provocative novelists"--

A Story

The Moravian Night

Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Krishna Winston

The Fruit Thief : or, One-Way Journey into the Interior

رسالة قصيرة للوداع الطويل

Mutsuzluga Doyum

The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

Absence

Sie war dreißig Jahre alt und lebte in einer terrassenförmig angelegten Bungalowsiedlung am südlichen Abhang eines Mittelgebirges, gerade über dem Dunst einer großen Stadt. Sie hatte Augen, die, auch wenn sie niemand anschaute, manchmal anschaute, manchmal aufstrahlten, ohne daß ihr Gesicht sich sonst veränderte.

Erzählung

Die linkshändige Frau

A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records -- both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations -- the details of Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.

The Weight of the World

"Those who gravitate to the regions where fiction, poetry, imaginative flights and speculative fancy converge constitute Handke's natural audience." - Publishers Weekly Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel Across tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisible threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.

Across

By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy. The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, "The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire," identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cézanne painted again and again. Finally, "Child Story" is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father--not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman--and his love for his growing daughter.

Peter Handke

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