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 does for European letters what Joan Didion did for American journalism, positing 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 to 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.
"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
"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."
