Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dngoldman 's review for:
Short Letter, Long Farewell
by Peter Handke
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Sometimes it takes an outsider. I thought of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" often while reading Peter Handke’s 70s noir masterpiece, "Short Letter, Long Farewell." There is a certain perspective that a foreigner who immerses themselves in another culture can offer, one that is hard to see from within. De Tocqueville is the classic example. His description of a young America—teeming with vibrancy and debate, but always flirting with the tyranny of the majority—made many factual mistakes but yet rings true. Much the same can be said of Austrian writer Peter Handke.
Handke places his unnamed protagonist in America’s heartland—Boston—when he receives the title’s “short letter” from his ex-wife: “I am in NY. Please don’t look for me. It would not be nice for you to find me.” Thus starts the unnamed character's search for his ex-wife across America, in a journey that explores the American psyche, ending in a conversation with the most American of directors, John Ford. But, as Elizabeth C. Bachner says in her Medium post, Handke’s “book is about exactly what it is not about, about exactly what he has deliberately, almost pathologically, left out.” T
The main character is either pursuing or trying to avoid his wife. Is he doing so because he thinks his violent nature will spill over, or is he afraid of hers? These are the mysteries that surround the “long farewell” part of the title. Handke takes a simple premise and embraces the noir style, but avoiding all of the standard plot twists. There is no chase scene, no actual violence, no detective work. The central mystery is not so much about what happens, but what is motivating the characters and the underlying nature of the society we live in.
The author paints a picture of America that is teeming with energy yet also has an undercurrent of violence that feels like it will boil over. America is a place focused on action. “For us, they [Presidents] have any biography their trade marks for what they did or what was done in their day.” Because there is no class, Americans “don't want to see roles, they want action; as they see it, a role isn't an adventure because in our country, everyone can play a role.” It is Ford that gets the last word as the weaver of stories, even if he doesn’t say anything new. Set off against current times, we can see how much we’ve lost what was once an essential American trait—“one of the reasons we don't think of our presidents as heroes is that they were elected by us and we never had to approach them with fear and trembling. Our heroes are our early settlers and pioneers, men in their own right who had adventures.”
The characters in "Short Letter, Long Farewell" similarly need to tell stories. They are searching, but for what is unclear. “It occurred to me that for a long time my own vision of the world around me had been twisted when I tried to describe something. I never knew what it looked like. I remembered only its anomalies and if there weren't any, I made them up.” The main character constantly questions time and moves in and out of dreams. His memories “were there, but every time I came near it, my brain shrunk back.” They are rootless: “I had to set myself up in someone's place. Where was I to go? I was superfluous. I had crept into something and now I stood there unmasked.” In this rootlessness, violence is always just beneath the surface. “My impatience grew so great that I could have murdered someone in my exasperation. The intermittent disembodied calm that came over me felt like the calm of a murder.” Yet, despite both the husband and wife seeming like they would murder each other, they meet without incident and separate after the epic John Ford conversation. And unlike most noir, there is actually no violence in the novel. While there is darkness, that’s not the only mood. “I was not so much to make something out of nothing or change one thing into another as to enchant myself… Today I interpret that feeling not as a desire to vanish from the face of the earth, but as joyful anticipation of a future when I would cease to be the person I was at the moment. It’s very much the same now when every day I tell myself that I’m one more day older and it must show. It’s got so I really want the time to pass and make me older.”
"Short Letter, Long Farewell" plumbs the inner psyche of its characters and the country they travel through. It’s a spare novel that often feels like a dream but is also filled with concrete details that the characters use to root themselves in reality.