Quiet Places: Collected Essays

by Peter Handke, Krishna Winston (Translator), Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Overview

A career-spanning collection of essays by the 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 into 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250862969
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Krishna Winston, now retired from teaching German literature and environmental studies at Wesleyan University, has been translating the work of Peter Handke since 1993. She has translated the work of many other authors, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Günter Grass, Christoph Hein, and Werner Herzog.

Ralph Manheim (1907–1992) was an American translator of German and French literature. He translated the work of many notable authors, including Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Günter Grass, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Handke. The PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation, inaugurated in his name, is a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation.

Table of Contents

Essay on Quiet Places
Essay on a Mushroom Maniac
Essay on Tiredness
Essay on the Jukebox
Essay on the Successful Day

Publisher’s Note

Editorial Reviews

"Handke often emphasizes not an event but, rather, a seemingly minor moment, the significance of which the person who experiences it does not even recognize . . . At their most successful, [Handke's stories] convey the impression that they already exist in nature, and the job of the writer is only to excavate them." —Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

“[Peter Handke] is widening the frontier of personal narrative. Shuttling between fiction and essay, he is making what feels like a new form, a kind of associative philosophical meditation that both maps and manifests the movements of mind . . . Each [essay] is a contained language event.” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review

"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 . . . Handke’s essays are existential and weighty, his writing wordy and winding, and he’s always richly imaginative." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

01/17/2022

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-11-17
Wide-ranging personal essays from one of Western literature’s more controversial authors.

Plenty of artists are a mixed bag, but the dichotomy Handke (b. 1942) presents is starker than most. The recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature, he is an unquestionably gifted author with an impressive oeuvre. Yet he takes strident political stances, such as his support of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with war crimes. Both sides of Handke, the former more than the latter, appear in these five essays. Topics include his perpetual search for quiet spaces, a quest that expressed “if not a flight from society, perhaps a revulsion against society, an aversion to society”; a defense attorney he calls “my friend the mushroom maniac, who’s vanished without a trace”; insomnia and “the divergent views of the world engendered by different kinds of tiredness,” including fatigue borne of political struggles; an attempt to write about jukeboxes, a mission he quickly found insignificant given that year’s political events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall; and a meditation on elements that constitute a successful day, whether for an author’s writing or for humankind in general. Handke makes curious statements—e.g., calling Austrians “the first hopelessly corrupt, totally incorrigible people in history, incapable of repentance or conversion”—and the prose, at least in translation, can get flamboyant: “Tell me about this successful day. Show me the dance of the successful day. Sing me the song of the successful day!” Yet the author is also admirably self-critical, asking in the essay on the trivial topic of jukeboxes at a time of world upheaval, “Was there anyone in the present time, when every day was a new historic date, more ridiculous, more perverse than himself?” The book also contains some welcome light touches, as when, in the essay on tiredness, he asks of himself, “Why so philosophical all of a sudden?”

Nuanced essays from a challenging writer whose appeal varies widely.

Kirkus Reviews