Incentives - New Literature from Austria

readme.cc provides multilingual access to the latest Austrian literature. In collaboration with the Literaturhaus in Vienna the reading forum offers the latest insights about literature published in Austria.

Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

The range of information is currently available in five languages: German, English, French, Czech and Hungarian.

The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

http://www.literaturhaus.at

[ Bogtip efter Incentives ] Night has already fallen as seven invited guests arrive on board a houseboat on the Morawa, a tributary of the Danube, to listen to the story of a former author, the story of a journey to the end of the night.
From an enclave (Serbian) in Kosovo, he sets off for the west in a bus full of emigrants. The trip leads him right across Europe and back to the places where he wrote, on his life’s search, on a search for true sensitivity. Handke, the poet of the demystified, of the un-settling world, yearns for the settled life that has been lost: “Show me the place where you are hidden!”
In former times he had found it in poetry, in solitude, in being on the road, in dreams – all of which were but “bastions of escape and consolation” erected to oppose the unsettling nature of reality, as a counterweight to which Handke sets up the homely character of the storytelling.
Not least, this book tells the story of a return to poetry, to life. The road is long and full of detours and hesitancy. To be permanently on the road is both the motivation and the goal of Handke’s writing, and his tone, a meandering, exuberant, stuttering, hesitant narrative style, is unmistakable: sagacious, eloquent, reflective, yet also wonderfully ironical, he calls into question his own role as a writer and contemplates the life-giving power of storytelling. It gives the reader “encouragement, consolation, fear and enchantment, in short, everything you want, and perhaps also that fleeting moment of truth which you have forgotten to enquire about.” (Joseph Conrad)
Martina Wunderer, 16. 9. 2008, translated by Peter Waugh

Original version: Martina Wunderer, 16. 9. 2008
http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=1337

[ Boginfo ] Handke, Peter: Die Morawische Nacht. (Night on the Morawa). (original language: Deutsch) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2008 . ISBN: 978-3-518-41950-2.