Quiet Places
Collected Essays
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in English
Quiet Places brings together Peter Handke’s forays into the border regions of life and story, upending the distinction between literature and the literary essay. Proceeding from the specificity of place (the mountains of Carinthia and Spain, the hinterlands of Paris) to specific objects (the jukebox, the boletus mushroom) to the irreducible particularity of our moods and mental impressions, these works—each a novella in its own right—offer rare insight into the affinities that can develop between a storyteller and the unlikeliest of subjects. Here, Handke posits a reevaluation of the possibilities and proper concerns of literature in a style unmistakably his own.
This collection unites the three essays from The Jukebox with two new works: “Essay on a Mushroom Maniac,” the story of a friend’s descent to and ascent from the depths of obsession, and “Essay on Quiet Places,” a memoiristic tour d’horizon of bathrooms and their place in Handke’s life and work. Featuring masterful translations by Krishna Winston and Ralph Manheim, this collection encapsulates the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The persistence of memory, a sense of alienation from oneself, and self-consciousness about one's writing process all come to the fore in these erudite essays from Nobel Prize winner Handke (The Moravian Night). In "Essay on Tiredness," he lays out different sorts of exhaustion, including that of farmhands, school children, and the "perpetually tired hero" Don Juan, while "Essay on the Jukebox" offers commentary on the author's trouble in getting to work on that very "long-planned essay on jukeboxes." The "Essay on Quiet Places," meanwhile, is an obsessive meditation on the nature of such spaces as bathrooms and the refuge they offer, and in "Essay on a Mushroom Maniac," which is nearer to a novella than an essay, Handke's friend, a lawyer, is on the hunt for the ineffable thing that might make sense out of the world. Mushroom hunting becomes a way of unraveling life's complexities, to the point that the lawyer slowly realizes that he has been "beautifully deluded." Handke's essays are existential and weighty, his writing wordy and winding, and he's always richly imaginative. This is as challenging as it is playful.
