**An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one
of Europe's most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter
Handke
**
Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends,
associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a
story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known
writer's recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits
places that represent stages of the narrator's 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, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of 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
appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of
his travels.
Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The
Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer,
tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life
inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline
prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and
perceptions while endowing 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 at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and
a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world
literature's great voices.
