Across

by Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Overview

"Those who gravitate to the regions where fiction, poetry, imaginative flights and speculative fancy converge constitute Handke's natural audience." - Publishers Weekly

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's novel Across tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisible threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374527648
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/15/2000
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as The Moravian Night, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Repetition. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence, and co-wrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders’ Wrong Movie and Wings of Desire. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

Editorial Reviews

"Those who gravitate to the regions where fiction, poetry, imaginative flights and speculative fancy converge constitute Handke's natural audience." - Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

One recognizes as pure Handke the scene, atmosphere, voice and tensions of this tale: the minutely observed streets of Salzburg and the countryside beyond; the still, murky air; the brooding, meditative voice; the sense of a violent storm gathering in narrator Andreas Loser's inner spaces. Unaccountably, Loser has knocked down a stranger in the street, taken a leave of absence from his post as teacher of ancient languages and left his family to move to a drab flat in a housing development. Why any of this has happened he cannot fathom. His attention is riveted elsewhere, as for example on the thresholds of structures in archeological digs (thresholds both actual and figurative enthrall him). He sees the ``accursed mark'' of a swastika painted on a tree and thereupon crosses a threshold in his own mind; running down the perpetrator, he stones him to death. Is he in turn now a criminal? To whom shall he confess his crime? Can he receive absolution? Those who gravitate to the regions where fiction, poetry, imaginative flights and speculative fancy converge constitute Handke's natural audience. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly