The Moravian Night: A Story

About this book

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer from one of Europes 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 writers recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds it visits places that represent stages of the narrators and the continents 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 jews-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 Handkes 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 literatures great voices.