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Short Letter, Long Farewell
  • Published: 31 March 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173060
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99

Short Letter, Long Farewell

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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.
  • Published: 31 March 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173060
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $32.99
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Also by Peter Handke

The Left-Handed Woman
The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Repetition
Slow Homecoming
See all

Praise for Short Letter, Long Farewell

  • "One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers." --The NY Times
  • "Perhaps the most interesting young writer in German today." --Frank Kermode
  • "Willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. [Handke] writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles...The best writer, altogether, in his language." --John Updike, The New Yorker
  • "Imagine a cross between Holden Caulfield and Bertolt Brecht...Handke ended up writing social criticism with a vengeance...though to some degree time-bound tales of angst, have a pained, mysterious beauty. Their alluring tension lies in the little war they prosecute between eloquence of expression and rage at the loss of meaning." --The NY Times
  • "The David Byrne of fiction: a writer with a resonant, powerfully direct voice who could invoke the particular Sartrean nausea of postmodern existence in the simplest events." --The NY Times
  • "In power and vision and range, Peter Handke is the most important new writer on the international scene since Beckett." --Stanley Kaufmann
  • "His prose is reminiscent of the writings of Henry James...a passion for understanding, for grasping the tortured complexities of contemporary life." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

  • "One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers." --The NY Times
  • "Perhaps the most interesting young writer in German today." --Frank Kermode
  • "Willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. [Handke] writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles...The best writer, altogether, in his language." --John Updike, The New Yorker
  • "Imagine a cross between Holden Caulfield and Bertolt Brecht...Handke ended up writing social criticism with a vengeance...though to some degree time-bound tales of angst, have a pained, mysterious beauty. Their alluring tension lies in the little war they prosecute between eloquence of expression and rage at the loss of meaning." --The NY Times
  • "The David Byrne of fiction: a writer with a resonant, powerfully direct voice who could invoke the particular Sartrean nausea of postmodern existence in the simplest events." --The NY Times
  • "In power and vision and range, Peter Handke is the most important new writer on the international scene since Beckett." --Stanley Kaufmann
  • "His prose is reminiscent of the writings of Henry James...a passion for understanding, for grasping the tortured complexities of contemporary life." --The Philadelphia Inquirer