Short Letter, Long Farewell

By Peter Handke
Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim
Introduction by Greil Marcus

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.

Reviews

The novel is full of vivid snapshots of American characters and scenes, and the idiosyncratic mixture of narrative, interior monologue, natural description and cultural themes and clichés is a brilliant concoction.
— Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review

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 pebbles... The best writer, altogether, in his language.
— John Updike, The New Yorker

Also see:

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams By Peter Handke Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides "In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the author confronts his mother’s suicide in a compelling story that is like an explanation of a recurrent dream, a dream so vividly expressed it becomes our dream." —Chicago Sun Times

Slow Homecoming By Peter Handke Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim Introduction by Benjamin Kunkel A trilogy in which Handke, putting aside the nerve-racked style of his early work for a new simplicity, meditates on exile, art, and the nature of the bonds between parent and child.

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