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The Moravian Night book cover
The Moravian Night
A Story
2008
First Published
3.36
Average Rating
370
Number of Pages

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelists Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava river, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of a former writer gather to hear him tell a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's odyssey across Europe. As his story unwinds, he seeks out places that represent stages of his and the continent's 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 to Austria, from a congress for experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of Jew's harp virtuosos. His story—and its telling—are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer, and seems to be as much of a demon as she is the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night tracks the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of life. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke tenaciously follows the movement of his own thoughts while gracing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world." The Moravian Night is a bruising self-portrait, an elegy for the lost and forgotten, and a novel of self-interrogation and uneasy discovery from one of world literature’s great voices.

Avg Rating
3.36
Number of Ratings
303
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
26%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
15%
1 STARS
11%
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Author

Peter Handke
Peter Handke
Author · 46 books

Peter Handke (* 6. Dezember 1942 in Griffen, Kärnten) ist ein österreichischer Schriftsteller und Übersetzer. Peter Handke is an Avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. He has also collaborated with German director Wim Wenders, writing the script for The Wrong Move and co-writing the screenplay for Wings of Desire.

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