Storm Still

Peter Handke

Translated by Martin Chalmers

 

5.5 x 7.75 inches, 112pp. February 2014

ISBN : 9780857425584

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Peter Handke, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama informed by some of the most tumultuous events in modern history. But even as these events shaped his work, the presence of his mother—a woman whose life spanned the Weimar Republic, both world wars, and the postwar consumer economy—loomed even larger.

 

In Storm Still, Handke’s most recent work, he returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. There on the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria’s Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of a family meet and talk. Composed as a series of monologues, Storm Still chronicles both the battle of the Slovene minority against Nazism and their love of the land. Presenting a panorama that extends back to the author’s bitter roots in the region, Storm Still blends penetrating prose and poetic drama to explore Handke’s personal history, taking up themes from his earlier books and revisiting some of their characters. In this book, the times of conflict and peace, war and prewar, and even the seasons themselves shift and overlap. And the fate of an orchard comes to stand for the fate of a people.

“Numerous pleasures await the reader who delves into the fabric of Peter Handke’s prose. . . A subtle writer of unostentatious delicacy, Handke excels at fiction that, as it grows, coils around itself like wisteria. . . This is where the French New Novel might have gone if pushed.”—Paul West, Washington Post Book World

 

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. 

 

Martin Chalmers is a translator and editor. He grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. His translations include works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hubert Fichte, Ernst Weiss, Herta Mueller, Alexander Kluge, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar and Erich Hackl. At present Chalmers lives in Berlin.

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