A panorama that reaches beyond all literary genres while simultaneously transforming them, here prose and drama, the theatrical and the poetical, the historical and the personal are fused.

Jaunfeld, in the south of Austria, in Carinthia: a number of family members have gathered around an »I« (or is that »I« standing to the side?): grandparents and their children, among them even the I’s own mother. Accompanying him into his dreams they appear in a sequence of scenes in which the most diverse performance- and speech-forms alternate – a panorama that reaches beyond all literary genres while simultaneously transforming them. Has Peter Handke constructed a paradigmatic familial tragedy in scenes? (after all, two of the brothers die in the nineteen-forties). Is he, through the individual episodes, recounting the epic of a people, the Slovenes? (they were responsible for the only armed resistance toward the National Socialist regime within its original borders). Has he sketched a dramatic history of eternal losers? (who believed history to be on their side yet still did not manage to achieve anything)? Or is he, through the dramatic narrative, turning back to his own biography, what formed it, and what happened?

In Peter Handke’s new book prose and drama, the theatrical and the poetical, the historical and the personal are fused and in the end it is debatable whether the mother’s surviving brother really has the last word: »There is still a storm blowing. A permanent storm. Still storm. Yes, we have done wrong – the wrong of being born here, especially here.«

The Long Way Around