Peter Handke Boeken

The book features three introspective meditations by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, exploring themes of memory and identity as he navigates from Alaska to his Austrian childhood. Through this self-reflexive journey, Handke delves into the nuances of the writing process, offering a profound reflection on the interplay between place and personal history.

This collection features six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, showcasing his early career as an Austrian playwright. The works reflect his innovative approach to language and form, exploring themes of identity, existence, and the human experience. Handke's unique narrative style and profound insights into the complexities of life are evident throughout these plays, offering readers a glimpse into the foundational elements that shaped his later acclaimed works.

Here, in one edition, are two provocative novels that show why, as John Updike has written in The New Yorker, "Handke is widely regarded by many as the best writer in his language". The two stories, "A Moment of True Feeling", and "The Left-Handed Woman", confirm Handke's enormous gifts as a writer.

This journal blends professional notes and personal reflections, capturing Handke's life in Paris from late 1975 to early 1977. It features informal jottings and deeper meditations, highlighting encounters with notable figures like Truffaut and Goethe, as well as Handke's poignant observations on strangers and his complex bond with his daughter. A significant hospital stay also prompts contemplations on mortality, revealing his ongoing anxieties about life and death.

Two plays from the 2019 Nobel laureate for literature explore the life-affirming qualities of languageIn these two plays, here translated into English for the first time, the renowned Austrian writer Peter Handke inquires into the boundaries and life-affirming qualities of language. At a time when language no longer seems to serve the purposes of a genuine human community, Handke asks, is such a community possible?In Voyage to the Sonorous Land , or The Art of Asking , a cockeyed optimist and a spoilsport lead a group of characters to the hinterland of their imaginations, where they search not for the right answers but for the right questions. The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other takes place in a city square where more than 400 characters pass by one another without speaking a single word. Handke here journeys to the brink of Who is that person passing by? Is she on her way, or is she coming back? Is her story ahead of her, or is it behind? In the silence of the square, Handke returns the gift of speech, the magic of telling a story, to the spectator. 

In this visionary novel, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke offers descriptions of objects, relationships, and events that teach readers a renewed way of seeing; he creates a wealth of images to replace those lost to convention and conformity. On the outskirts of a northwestern European river port city lives a powerful woman banker, a public figure admired and hated in equal measure, who has decided to turn from the worlds of high finance and modern life to embark on a quest. Having commissioned a famous writer to undertake her "authentic" biography, she journeys through the Spanish Sierra de Gredos and the region of La Mancha to meet him. As she travels by all-terrain vehicle, bus, and finally on foot, the nameless protagonist encounters five way stations that become the stuff of her biography and the biography of the modern world, a world in which genuine images and unmediated experiences have been exploited and falsified by commercialization and by the voracious mass media. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a very human book of yearning and the ancient quest for love, peopled with memorable characters (from multiple historical periods) and imbued with Handke's inimitable ability to portray universal, inner-worldly adventures that blend past, future, present, and dreamtime.

The narrative follows Gregor Keuschnig, who, after a haunting nightmare of committing murder, decides to embrace a dual existence. This choice sets him on a path of introspection and exploration of identity, as he navigates the complexities of his new life. Handke delves into themes of guilt, reality, and the human psyche, creating a thought-provoking story that examines the boundaries between truth and illusion.

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, this title presents a monologue delivered by the 'she' in Beckett's play.

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.

"A collection of literary essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke"--