Bøker av Peter Handke

A career-spanning collection of essays by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, featuring two new works never before published in EnglishQuiet 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: "e;Essay on a Mushroom Maniac,"e; the story of a friend's descent to and ascent from the depths of obsession, and "e;Essay on Quiet Places,"e; 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.

«Kravløs ulykke» (utgitt på norsk første gang i 1974) er et av nobelprisvinner Peter Handke mest sentrale verk. Peter Handkes mor var en usynlig kvinne. Hele livet - som strakte seg gjennom nazitiden, krigen og etterkrigstidens konsumentøkonomi - strevde hun med å holde fasaden, bare for å komme til følgende tragiske erkjennelse: «Jeg er jo ikke menneske mer.» Kort tid etter begikk hun selvmord ved hjelp av en overdose sovepiller. I Kravløs ulykke bestemmer sønnen seg for å skrive ned det han vet, eller det han tror han vet, om sin mors liv og død. Dette må han gjøre før den sløve apatien som fulgte meddelelsen om selvmordet, blir permanent. Språkløsheten Handke opplever i forbindelse med morens selvmord, er kjernen i denne korte, men uforglemmelige elegien. Denne nøkterne, ærlige og dypt berørende boken er en av de største prestasjonene til en stor samtidsforfatter. Peter Handke ble i 2019 tildelt Nobelprisen med følgende begrunnelse: «For et innflytelsesrikt forfatterskap som med stor språkkunst har utforsket periferien og menneskenes konkrete erfaringer.»

Montøren Joseph Bloch mener seg avskjediget fra jobben, og kapper forbindelsen med en "systematisert" tilværelse. Han driver gjennom byen, lar sine handlinger diktere av tilfeldige impulser og av en dunkel aggresjonslyst. Han flakker fremmedgjort omkring i en verden der bevegelser, lyder og ord utløser hans irritasjon i tilfeldige voldshandlinger. Alt han foretar seg virker tilfeldig og lite planlagt. Han greier ikke å forbinde enkelthetene han ser sammen til en helhet, greier ikke å riste de tilfeldige brikkene sammen til et mønster, og blir stående uforstående og hjelpeløs overfor livet rundt ham.

Forfatterens tolvte bok på norsk, og hans hovedverk hittil. Denne beretningen om en jurist og forfatter inntar en særstilling i forfatterskapet. Historien er i det ytre udramatisk: nedskriften om et eneboerliv i en av Paris' landlige forsteder. Men et indre drama gjennomspilles: forholdet til en fraskilt hustru, til en sønn, til en håndfull mennesker som har stått eneboer-fortelleren nær.

Om Sorger og hans problematiske forhold til den ytre og indre virkelighet, og om hans reise hjem.

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke-one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original worksOn a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters-with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day-are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait.In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.

The latest work by Peter Handke chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center.

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke''s autobiographical novel My Year in No-Man''s Bay is "a meditation on two decades of a writer''s life culminating in a solitary, sobering year of reckoning" (Publishers Weekly).In his most substantial novel to date, Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer--a man much like Handke himself--who undergoes a "metamorphosis" from self-assured artist into passive "observer and chronicler." He explores the world and describes his many severed relationships, from his tenuous contact with his son, to a failed marriage to "the Catalan," to a doomed love affair with a former Miss Yugoslavia. As the writer sifts through his memories, he is also under pressure to complete his next novel, but he cannot decide how to come to terms with both the complexity of the world and the inability of his novel to reflect it.

The author, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama. In this work, he returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. There on the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria's Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of a family meet and talk.

A monologue delivered by the female character in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape.

This volume contains 22 stories and novellas, many appearing in English for the first time. Among the authors represented are Peter Handke, Alfred Andersch, Stefan Andres, Jurgen Becker, Ulla Merkewicz, Elisabeth Borchers, Gisela Elsner and Max von der Grun.