Short Letter, Long Farewell (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Peter Handke (Author), Ralph Manheim (Translator), Greil Marcus (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: March 31, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Austrian novelist Peter Handke is known for his fictional meditations on the uneasy relationship between language and reality. These three interrelated stories are ‘the work of a totally serious major artist,' Malcolm Bradbury said here in 1985. 'He believes in writing as an artistic and philosophical inquiry, a search into forms.'” –The New York Times

“The three works comprising Slow Homecoming are closer to a true dialectic than Handke’s work has ever before sought.” –American Book Review

“This is a postmodernism in its most exciting and challenging form, a work of literature that makes the redefinition of reality and of fiction a possibility.” –Choice


“Handke’s self-portrait of the artist [leaves] us with doubts that can only be induced by the work of a totally serious major artist.” –Malcolm Bradbury, The New York Times Book Review

"Handke is a prolific writer of plays, poetry, short stories, literary essays and scripts for television and film...Handke orders in a language so powerful and self-possessed - and marvelously translated by Ralph Manheim - without ever being precious or self-conscious, that it creates an imagined awareness a leap beyond what we thought possible. A rich and delicate gift, before which the reader both spins and stands still." –The San Francisco Chronicle

“A leading literary figure in the first generation of Germans to grow up after the war...He is a man of real intellectual power and sometimes visionary insight. His fingers are never far from the pulse...“ –The Washington Post

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PRAISE FOR HANDKE

“One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers.” –Lawrence Graver, The New York Times

“Peter Handke…perhaps the most interesting young writer in German today.” –Frank Kermode

"There is no denying Handke's willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. He writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebblesÉThe best writer, altogether, in his language." –John Updike, The New Yorker

"His experimental poetry and anarchic, anti-authoritarian work win him a following among Germany's left-wing `1968ers'. Handke aims to strip away unnecessary words and challenge linguistic conventions, developing a spare, robust prose style." –The Guardian

"IMAGINE a cross between Holden Caulfield and Bertolt Brecht, and you'll have a sense of the Austrian novelist, playwright and screenwriter Peter Handke, whose alienation from the phony and harmful adult world is as pure as his esthetic purity is purposefully alienating...As it happened, 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 New York Times

"Peter Handke made his reputation as an important writer with a fierce, icy set of plays and novels: Offending the Audience, Kaspar, The Ride Across Lake Constance, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. Oblique yet startlingly immediate, these works embodied in fresh fictional and dramatic forms concerns that seemed particularly postmodern, notably an obsession (indeed, a disgust) with the way language itself defines and constricts human possibilities." –The New York 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 New York Times

“Handke is a securely established star of the German-speaking literary world, ‘the darling of the West German critics,’ and a ‘key figure of his generation.’” –The New York Times

“One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers.” –The New York Times

“Handke was and is, one of the most eminent narrative and dramatic writers of postwar Europe.” –The Boston Globe

“Peter Handke must be acknowledged as one of the major voices in contemporary fiction.” –Partisan Review

“One awaits with pleasure whatever Peter Handke turns to next…Since the 1960s, he has been a popularly acclaimed novelist, playwright and poet and a long-standing critical success. He now creates a more rarefied, demanding art coupled with a lucid yet mythic affirmation of life.” –The Boston Herald

“In power and vision and range, Peter Handke is the most important new writer on the international scene since Beckett.” –Stanley Kaufmann, Saturday Review

“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

“Peter Handke achieved the kind of succes de scandale every ambitious young writer dreams of... and Mr. Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde...But Mr. Handke has aged well, and now, as the prolific author of plays, novels, essays, stories and poems, he is regarded as one of the most important writers in German.” —The New York Times

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590173066
• ISBN-13: 978-1590173060
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,180,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Handke, July 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Short Letter, Long Farewell (Paperback)

Sandwiched between 'Goalie's Anxiety...' and 'Sorrow Beyond Dreams,' you couldn't help but think the statute of limitations would make 'Short Letter...' into some kind of 'token disappointment,' added to assure readers that mediocrity wasn't an American patent. How can a writer hit the nail three times? Three varying works with very different and developed themes and separate styles...the more plot-driven 'Goalie,' the nameless (and deceptively endless) wandering narration of an ex-husband, hunted and letting himself be hunted by his ex-wife in 'Short Letter...,' and the almost unspeakable 'Sorrow Beyond Dreams.'
'Short Letter' is split in two. It contains some of the most stunning prose you will ever catch. Every line reads with revelation and almost escapes the previous build up, but never quite loses the focus of narration, as it seems to want to do. The threads tie themselves as the narrator constantly re-encounters, no matter how far or where he goes, some part of his past, whether its a receipt for money he sent his brother in Oregon, the agave plant which he first encounters in a bar early on on the label of a bottle of tequila, and then later in the desert of Arizona, or his ex-wife, who though in deadly pursuit of him, he at first leaves clues to make sure the pursuit is possible. John Ford movies and then later John Ford himself. Somebody who admits to being 'social' and who needs to be around people to make sure they aren't cutting him or somebody else down (as opposed to the narrator who even with people is more without (or within) than with. Nevertheless, the director is stunned to hear the story the reader has just gone through which involves two solitudes bordering on each other, bordering on disaster itself.
Read with caution - you might forget that expectations don't have to be lowered...

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Farewell, May 25, 2009

By 

The Ginger Man - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Short Letter, Long Farewell (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Since 1999, NYRB Classics has brought back into print a series of under appreciated works in handsome paperback editions. Their website asks readers to suggest out of print books that should again be accessible. Through NYRB, I have found pleasant surprises like Stoner, Ebenezer Le Page and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. I have also have been disappointed with entries such as Boredom, Jakob Van Guten and Short Letter, Long Farewell.

Amazon's summary of this novel suggests a combination of personal introspection and narrative events. There really is very little in the way of plot, however, and I didn't find the nameless protagonist interesting enough, nor his internal dialogue compelling enough, to allow me to recommend the book. The anti-hero comes to America with a Gatsby-like desire to remake himself. He cannot achieve this due to his inability to experience the world outside his mind. He avoids his former wife, leaves his current lover and even refuses to meet his brother after he chances to see the latter defecate in the woods. This is far too quotidian an experience for the nameless one to countenance.

He explains, "In the world I lived in, my dreams were really fantasies, because they had no connection with anything in that world, there was nothing comparable that would have made them possible. As a result, I never became fully conscious of the world around me or my dreams, and that's why I never remember them."

An antidote to this alienation is finally provided in the unlikely person of Director John Ford, who tells the narrator: "I'm only happy when I know exactly what I want. Then I'm so happy I feel as if there were no teeth in my mouth."

The author, however, has little and wants even less. He describes himself as filthy, bedraggled and frazzled and admits, "I had been enjoying all the poses of alienation available to me for too long." These poses are challenging for the reader to endure as well. After a long farewell, I was ready for the simple advice of John Ford. It is doubtful that the unnamed hero has come to feel the same way.