Peter Handke - Free Library Land Online - Philosophy

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

Tue, 25 Nov 1997 15:18:38 +0200

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic, short novel about one man's conflict with himself and his journey toward resolution. During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator. The pharmacist is known and well-respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations and reflections. The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, travelling into the Alps with two companions—a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet—where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives...

The Ballad of the Last Guest

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 18:22:24 +0200

A novel about a man who returns home, only to find that home is now unrecognizable, by the Nobel laureate Peter Handke.

Gregor returns home from another continent. The landscape, formerly dotted with small villages, has been absorbed into the outskirts of a large city, both familiar and foreign at the same time. His father sits playing cards, waiting for him, but Gregor is surprised to find his sister holding an infant. He, the older brother, is to be the child's godfather—though he also carries with him the secret of his younger brother's death.
In the end, Gregor is never quite able to stay put. He is drawn out into the world, into the streets and alleys of what is now a city, to the cinema, the soccer stadium, the forest, and above all the old fruit orchard, now overgrown and beyond saving. As he walks, the present and the past become intertwined—memories of childhood surface, and inner voices enter into dialogue.
Revisiting many of the...

Left Handed Women

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:18:38 +0200

A young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother in Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman.

One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. And instinctively Marianne knows she must fend for herself and her young son now, before that time comes. She sends Bruno away and settles down to a life alone, at first experiencing moments of panic, restlessly wandering in rooms grown stifling. The stillness of the house wears her down, and she starts taking long walks, or visiting with her close friend, Franziska. Gradually, what began as a selfish escape from the prospects of the future becomes in fact liberation. The environment...

The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:37:31 +0300

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

'Portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus' The Stranger' The New York Times
Joseph Bloch, a once-famous goalkeeper turned construction worker, commits a random murder without thought or regret. As he wanders the streets, from hotel to bar, cinema to tram stop, experiencing strange and violent encounters on the way, he finds himself, and everything around him, disintegrating. Told in spare and icy prose, Peter Handke's masterpiece of alienation takes apart our ideas of humanity and reality itself.
'A Kafkaesque crime novel' Los Angeles Times

Translated by Michael Roloff

The Afternoon of a Writer

Mon, 09 Mar 1987 17:42:41 +0300

The Fruit Thief

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 17:46:17 +0200

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke—one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works
On a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters—with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who...

Slow Homecoming

Mon, 26 Nov 1979 08:05:20 +0300

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.

Absence

Thu, 26 Nov 1987 08:05:19 +0300

Quatre personnages anonymes, une femme, un soldat, le joueur et le vieil homme, réunis par l'aventure de l'espace quotidien le découvrent au fur et à mesure qu'il s'étend devant eux - le plus proche devient un paysage lointain, un terrain vague devient l'immensité, une étendue dénudée le désert. À chaque pas naissent des paysages inconnus, c'est le regard qui les fait apparaître. Les endroits les plus banals deviennent des terres inconnues. Peut-être le voyage s'est-il déroulé à travers un grand pays vide ou aux confins immédiats d'une ville, on ne sait, mais il révèle aux voyageurs les lignes du sol, sa consistance, ses dimensions et les transforme en lieux d'être. La fin du voyage, aussi fortuite que le début, sépare ce groupe rassemblé par le visible et rend chacun des voyageurs à sa solitude initiale. Le 'guide' qui les a conduits est peut-être l'absence. Ce qu'ils ont en commun, c'est ce qu'ils ont vu.

The Second Sword

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 21:31:32 +0300

Two novellas by Peter Handke—his first new works since he won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are two new novellas by the 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke. The first picks up the story where Handke's last work of fiction, The Fruit Thief (described in The New York Times as "an experience of unadulterated literature"), left off. Here a man has returned to his home in the suburbs of Paris, only to soon set out again. Why? We learn, over the course of a story redolent of Handke's harrowing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that he is seeking to avenge his mother, who has been unjustly denounced in the pages of a newspaper. The Second Sword is a suspenseful work of self-examination: Will the narrator's journey end in him throwing down the gauntlet?
My Day in the Other Land is Handke's most recently published work—and the first to be written after he was...

Kaspar and Other Plays

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 08:05:23 +0300

Kaspar, Peter Handke's first full-length drama--hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot--is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed. In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know. **

Across

Sat, 26 Nov 1983 08:05:23 +0300

Handke's novel 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 invisble threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.

Repetition

Wed, 26 Nov 1986 08:05:26 +0300

Set in 1960, this novel tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him. In the summer of 1960, young Filip Kobal leaves his home to search for his missing brother. He is led not only in the direction of his brother, but to an investigation of language and to recapturing a past.

My Year in No Man's Bay

Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:05:19 +0200

In his most substaintial novel to date, Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer--a man much like Handke himself--who undergoes a "metamorphosis" from self-assured artist into passive "observer and chronicler." He explores the world and describes his many severed relationships, from his tenuous contact with his son, to a failed marriage to "the Catalan," to a doomed love affair with a former Miss Yugoslavia. As the writer sifts through his memories, he is also under pressure to complete his next novel, but he cannot decide how to come to terms with both the complexity of the world and the inability of his novel to reflect it.

The Moravian Night

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:05:22 +0200

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelistsMysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava river, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of a former writer gather to hear him tell a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's odyssey across Europe. As his story unwinds, he seeks out places that represent stages of his and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain to Austria, from a congress for experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of Jew's harp virtuosos. His story—and its telling—are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer, and seems to be as much of a demon as she is the longed-for destination of his travels.Powerfully alive, honest, and at...