The Great Fall

Peter Handke

Translated by Krishna Winston

 

5 x 8 inches, 224pp. May 2018

ISBN : 9780857425348

Rs  599.00 (HB)
$24.50 (HB)
£18.99 (HB)

Buy (HB)

'On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.'

 

The Great Fall chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its centre. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country’s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film—perhaps his last. The actor passes through a forest, then continues on his path through a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts. After crossing a seemingly insuperable highway, he wanders into an abandoned railyard where police, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism, before, finally, he arrives in the city.

 

In this heart-wrenching, humourous and sharply critical narrative, Peter Handke engages the reader to figure out and experience what constitutes the 'Great Fall'.

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria in 1942. His many works of fiction include Absence, Across, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Short Letter, Long Farewell. 

 

Krishna Winston, professor and chair of the German Studies Department in the Wesleyan University, is the principal English-language translator for the works of the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass. She also translated Peter Handke’s Don Juan.