3.0
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesOn a Dark Night I Left My Silent House Reviews
3.0
“Peripheries, borders, outlines. Peter Handke's characters often exist somewhere beyond the physical realm of existence. Something that is not immediately apparent. To put it as succinctly as possible, Handke's characters exist on the outline of existence as a phenomenon. The same can be said for Handke's choice of setting as well. His novels either are set in a forgotten town in the border of Austria or they blur and drift between multiple locations that pinning down a definitive setting becomes impossible.
ON A DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE is to Peter Handke what THE IRISHMAN was to Martin Scorsese. The reason I draw this parallel is because just like Scorsese's film, Handke's novel is in retrospect Handke introspecting his artistic career until that point. Its a moment of self reflection caught in the bottle of a novel. It is Handke looking back at the artistic detritus he has left behind until then. It is about Handke taking stock of his literary inventory while also a contemplation of whether he has anything more to offer. Or rather, is the act of creating art an act as philanthropic as an "offering"? Or does an artist create art for reasons more misanthropic than meets the eye? Handke operates somewhere between philanthropy and misanthropy while trying to solve this quandary.
Talking about borders, thats exactly where Handke is operating from, whether the characters being in search of a setting or a setting being search of populating itself with characters. Between characters turning into people or people turning into characters. His creations are in some ways neither characters nor people, they are entities stranded in the no man's land of literary ambiguity. Handke alludes to deeper readings of his text where reading between the lines becomes the only way to read Handke.
The literal is definitely not something Handke is interested in, especially evident in his waking-dream-esqe prose. The text seamlessly segues between event and rumination in a manner that we humans segue between thought and action. This segue-ing is something the reader is compelled to acclimatize to which in turn makes the act of reading between the lines an impulse of the subconscious rather than a prompt by the conscious.”
About Peter Handke
was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include
,
,
, and
, all published by FSG. Handke's dramatic works include
and the screenplay for Wim Wenders's
. 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."
Other books by Peter Handke
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