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A Story
by Peter Handke (author), Krishna Winston (translator)
An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelists.
Mysteriously 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 times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night tracks the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of life. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke tenaciously follows the movement of his own thoughts while gracing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world." The Moravian Night is a bruising self-portrait, an elegy for the lost and forgotten, and a novel of self-interrogation and uneasy discovery from one of world literature's great voices.
"Starred Review. A sad story perhaps, but one in which fantasy and history dance nimbly. Stellar." - Kirkus
"A searching exploration of how travel and storytelling can help us find our truest selves."- Booklist
"In this story where memory and reality battle, Handke (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) once again showcases his valuable insight and imagination." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Moravian Night was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many works include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in No-Man's Bay, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, and Don Juan, all published by FSG. Handke's plays include Kaspar and The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, and he wrote the screenplay for Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. In 2014, Handke was awarded the International Ibsen Prize.
Krishna Winston is the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University. She has translated more than thirty books and has received several prizes for excellence in translation.
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