Short Letter, Long Farewell

by Peter Handke

Other authorsRalph Manheim (Translator), Greil Marcus (Introduction)

Paperback, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

833.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

NYRB Classics (2009), Paperback, 192 pages

Description

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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member icolford

Peter Handke's novel Short Letter Long Farewell chronicles a journey through America's heartland. The story opens in Providence, where the narrator, a young man of German origin who remains unnamed throughout the book, checks into a hotel to find that his wife Judith has left a letter warning him

not to go looking for her in New York. What ensues is a quest of sorts--in which the narrator and his wife pursue and evade each other across an American landscape that is anything but idealized--with stops in St. Louis and Tuscon--that ends on the Pacific coast. It does not give anything away to state that Judith's intentions, apparently murderous, never come to fruition, though at several points it does seem that the narrator's life is in danger. The precise nature of the rift between the narrator and his wife is left unexplained, and the action, though closely observed by a narrator obsessed with detail and the workings of his own mind, seems to take place behind a screen, at a slight remove from reality. Short Letter Long Farewell avoids conventional plotting in favour of a kind of random structure that infuses the action with the sort of suspense one might feel at the roulette table. An absorbing tale of estrangement and reconciliation told against a backdrop of late 1960s America.

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