The Moravian Night: A Story

3.3/5 ( ratings)

An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe's most provocative novelists

Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava river, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of a former writer gather to hear him tell a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer's odyssey across Europe. As his story unwinds, he seeks out places that represent stages of his 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 to Austria, from a congress for 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 seems to be as much of a demon as she is the longed-for destination of his travels.

Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night tracks the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of life. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke tenaciously follows the movement of his own thoughts while gracing 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 a bruising self-portrait, an elegy for the lost and forgotten, and a novel of self-interrogation and uneasy discovery from one of world literature’s great voices.