Short Letter, Long Farewell

Short Letter, Long Farewellis one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of Americafrom Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all,Short Letter, Long Farewellis a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new lifeor the corpse of an old onelying just around the corner.

Peter Handke, a novelist, poet, and playwright, was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many works include The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling, Absence, Repetition, and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (NYRB, 2002).

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces; Mystery Train; The Dustbin of History; The Old,Weird America; and other books. He lives in Berkeley, California.