The Moravian Night

by Peter Handke, Krishna Winston (Translator)

Overview

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe’s most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke

Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer’s recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator’s and the continent’s past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew’s-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels.

Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “Handke’s sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world.”

The Moravian Night is at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world literature’s great voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537173
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as The Moravian Night, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Repetition. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence, and co-wrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders’ Wrong Movie and Wings of Desire. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

Krishna Winston is the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University. She has translated more than thirty books, including five previous works by Peter Handke and works by Werner Herzog, Günter Grass, Christoph Hein, and Goethe.

Editorial Reviews

"Peter Handke commands one of the great German-language prose styles of the postwar period, a riverine rhetoric deep and swift and contrary of current." —Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review

"A searching exploration of how travel and storytelling can help us find our truest selves." —Poornima Apte, Booklist

"The renowned Austrian novelist looks back on a body of work and a terrible century in this elegiac tale . . . Some of Handke's text is a kind of meditation on history . . . And some is simply lovely . . . Stellar." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

Peter Handke commands one of the great German-language prose styles of the postwar period, a riverine rhetoric deep and swift and contrary of current. Since the first of his 100 or so books of fiction, poetry, essays and plays appeared in 1966, his talent has been inarguable…The Moravian Night…might be the most important novel of Handke's career.

The New York Times Book Review - Joshua Cohen

10/10/2016
The Moravian Night is the name of a boat moored on the Morava River, where a gathering takes place in which a writer tells friends the story of a journey he once took through Europe. The book’s journey appears to begin in Kosovo. The somewhat unreliable narrator tells his friends of “following the example of the rivers,” meandering through Spain, Portugal, and Handke’s native Austria, before circling back to the Balkans, which no longer exist the way the storyteller once knew them. He encounters a varied cast of characters. Few places are named, nor does the reader ever know precisely where the narrator is, on land or in the mind, recollecting, philosophizing, dreaming. Further muddling the narrative are the friends the narrator has gathered, who sometimes take up or interrupt the story with their own version of things during the long dark night. At the center is a woman, on the boat and in the story, a mysterious figure lurking, serving, talking, perhaps even orchestrating. In this story where memory and reality battle, Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) once again showcases his valuable insight and imagination. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2016-09-17
The renowned Austrian novelist looks back on a body of work and a terrible century in this elegiac tale, first published in German in 2008.Every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia. So opens Handkes (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 2007, etc.) novel, evoking the Thousand and One Nights, Cervantes, Machado, Borges. These fabled places of refuge on the far ends of the world are joined by a houseboat on the Morava River, a tributary of the Danube where the Slavic and German worlds meet and armies have long clashed. There, a storyteller gathers a group of friends, associates, distant neighbors, collaborators of the former writer, for whom, in the face of deep danger, he offers a multitiered, time-shifting tale that crosses borders and decades, one in which figures from other Handke novels make appearances, to say nothing of angels and demons. Some of Handkes text is a kind of meditation on history; having come under much criticism a quarter-century ago for his defense of Serbia during the most recent round of Balkans wars, he places that region on the edges of Numantia and Samarkand, joining it to the fabulous: Where had they begun, his and our Balkans? Long before the geographic and morphological border. Some of it is a subtly defiant self-defense, begging the question of who turned out to be right: A sad story? the tale closes. That remained to be seen. And some is simply lovely, as when, in one of his guises, the narrator, passing across La Manchashades of Cervantes againsuddenly confronts his literary and actual past: One after the other, his forebears came toward him in the early light, reached him, went by him. All play a role in his life and story, he adds, one whose threads are still playing out even as Handkes modern epic ends. A sad storyperhaps, but one in which fantasy and history dance nimbly. Stellar.

Kirkus Reviews