Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - Austria

International Bestseller

Winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award

Longlisted for American Literary Translators Association's Translation Prize in Prose

Andreas Egger knows every path and peak of his mountain valley, the source of his sustenance, his livelihood--his home.

Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, Robert Seethaler's Whole Life is a story of man's relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of...

The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

"A remarkably abstract book even for the very abstract Handke ...Slippery but engrossing work, silkily translated." - Kirkus Reviews

Handke's novel tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisble threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.