The Left-Handed Woman: Peter Handke (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Handke, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024145767X ISBN 13: 9780241457672

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2020

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

'One of Europe's great writers' Karl Ove Knausgaard

One evening Marianne, a suburban housewife living in an identikit bungalow, is struck by the realization that her husband will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. So she sends him away, knowing she must fend for herself and her young son. As she adjusts to her disorienting new life alone, what she thought was fear slowly starts to feel like freedom.

'Knifelike clarity of evocation ... Handke is a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape' John Updike

Translated by Ralph Manheim

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Ralph Manheim was a Jewish-American translator of German and French literature. He translated the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Martin Heidegger and Hermann Hesse, among others. Manheim received the 1964 PEN Translation Prize, the 1970 National Book Award in the Translation category and a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship in Literary Studies. He won the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation, in 1988. He died in 1992.

From the Back Cover

One evening Marianne, a suburban housewife living in an identikit bungalow, is struck by the realization that her husband will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. So she sends him away, knowing she must fend for herself and her young son. As she adjusts to her disorienting new life alone, what she thought was fear slowly starts to feel like freedom.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024145767X
• ISBN 13: 9780241457672
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80