Short Letter, Long Farewell (Masterplots II: World Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Peter Handke
- First Published: 1972
- Type of Work: Philosophical realism
- Time of Work: The late 1960’s or the early 1970’s
- Setting: The United States
- Principal Characters: The Narrator, Judith, Claire Madison, Delta Benedictine, John Ford
- Genres: Long fiction, Philosophical realism
- Subjects: 1960’s, Self-discovery, United States or Americans, Wives, Traveling or travelers, Marriage, Dreams, Death or dying, Existentialism, Isolation
- Locales: United States
The Novel
Short Letter, Long Farewell is one of Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke’s typically enigmatic works, a decidedly meditative novel which defies simple summary or definitive explanation. It seems to involve at once too little plot and too much; its events follow one another in bewildering succession and fail to form any clearly meaningful pattern.
The novel is divided into two nearly equal parts, “The Short Letter” and “The Long Farewell,” each preceded by a brief passage from Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser...
[The entire page is 2425 words long]
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