Short Letter, Long Farewell

Resumen del libro

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handkes 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 Americafrom 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? Everythings 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 lifeor the corpse of an old onelying just around the corner.

Biografía del autor

El escritor austriaco Peter Handke (1942) es ya un clásico contemporáneo de la literatura en lengua alemana. Con un estilo literario en el que prima la calidad y la autenticidad, por encima de cualquier otra consideración, su medio centenar de novelas, ensayos y obras de teatro tienen en común la angustia de la soledad, la incomunicación y, en no menor medida, la búsqueda de momentos trascendentes en el seno de la realidad cotidiana, eso que llama umbrales . Además del Premio Nobel de Literatura 2019, Handke recibió el Premio Georg Büchner (1973), equivalente al Cervantes de las letras alemanas, el Premio Kafka (1976) y el Premio Heine (2006), que rechazó. La mayor parte de su obra ha sido publicada a lo largo de los años en Alianza Editorial.