Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

Last updated
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
Peter Handke Der Bildverlus.png
Cover of the first edition
Author Peter Handke
Original titleDer Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos
Translator Krishna Winston
CountryGermany
LanguageGerman
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag
Publication date
15 January 2002
Published in English
10 July 2007
Pages760
ISBN 978-3-518-41310-4

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (German : Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos) is a 2002 novel by the Austrian writer Peter Handke. It tells the story of a successful female banker who makes a journey through the Sierra de Gredos mountain range in Spain to meet a famous author in La Mancha who will write her biography. On the way she makes stops where she is confronted with the unheroic and commercialised world she wishes to escape.

Contents

Publication

The book was published through Suhrkamp Verlag on 15 January 2002. [1] An English translation by Krishna Winston was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 17 July 2007. [2]

Reception

In the San Francisco Chronicle , Christopher Byrd wrote: "Handke's aesthetic agenda in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is unmistakable. It's executed by a form of philosophically inspired writing that leans less on existentialism, the go-to mode for many cerebral writers in the past, than on deconstruction. By zeroing in on the many things adventure stories leave out - for instance, the quality of the soil that the hero treads underfoot - Handke subverts the genre, so as to unmask our complacency with cliches." [3] Kirkus Reviews wrote: "This newest fiction shows [Handke] at his best and worst. ... The result is a work that embraces a disciplined attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the matter of everyday life (before it vanishes forever?), and a species of literate wool-gathering which seems to confirm Handke’s frequently reiterated assertion that all that exists is grist for the artist’s mill. ... Nobody writing today surpasses Peter Handke at trying to make sense of it all." [4] Guy Vanderhaeghe of The Washington Post called the book "a beautifully hallucinatory, eerily compelling novel". [5]

Related Research Articles

Peter Handke Austrian Nobel laureate novelist (born 1942)

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Though some praised Handke as a meritorious laureate, the decision to award him a Nobel Prize was also denounced internationally by a variety of public and academic intellectuals, writers, and journalists, who cited his support of the late Slobodan Milošević and Bosnian genocide denial.

Edmund Wilson American writer

Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer and literary critic who explored Freudian and Marxist themes. He influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished work he edited for publication. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux American book publishing company

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Peace Prizes. The publisher is currently a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a privately-held German company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies.

David Grossman Israeli author

David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

C. K. Williams American poet, critic and translator

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film Tar relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.

Edith Grossman American translator

Edith Grossman is an American Spanish-to-English literary translator. One of the most important contemporary translators of Latin American and Spanish literature, she has translated the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, Álvaro Mutis, and Miguel de Cervantes. She is a recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

<i>Kaspar</i> (play)

Kaspar is a play written by Austrian playwright Peter Handke. It was published in 1967. It was Handke's first full-length drama and was hailed in Europe as the "play of the Decade". It depicts "the foundling Kaspar Hauser as a near-speechless innocent destroyed by society’s attempts to impose on him its language and its own rational values."

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes extremely brief short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

<i>Los Angeles Times</i> Book Prize American literary awards

Since 1980, the Los Angeles Times has awarded a set of annual book prizes. The Prizes currently have nine categories: biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, and young adult fiction. In addition, the Robert Kirsch Award is presented annually to a living author with a substantial connection to the American West. It is named in honor of Robert Kirsch, the Los Angeles Times book critic from 1952 until his death in 1980 whose idea it was to establish the book prizes.

Durs Grünbein

Durs Grünbein is a German poet and essayist.

Dietmar Dath German author, journalist and translator

Dietmar Dath is a German author, journalist and translator.

Jonathan Galassi

Jonathan Galassi has served as the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is currently the Chairman and Executive Editor.

The German Book Prize is awarded annually in October by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the German publishers and booksellers association, to the best new German language novel of the year. The books, published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are nominated by their publishers, who can propose up to two books from their current or planned publication list. The books should be in shops before the short-list is announced in September of the award year. The winner is awarded €25,000, while the five shortlisted authors receive €2,500 each. It is presented annually during the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Watt Key American author

Albert Watkins Key, Jr., publishing under the name Watt Key and Albert Key, is an American fiction author who is known for writing young-adult survival fiction. A resident of Alabama, his debut novel Alabama Moon was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006 and was the 2007 winner of the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for older readers. It received a 2006 Parents' Choice Award. Alabama Moon has been translated and published in eight languages. In 2015 Alabama Moon was listed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 100 young-adult books of all time.

Hermann Karl Lenz was a German writer of poetry, stories, and novels. A major part of his work is a series of nine semi-autobiographical novels centring on his alter ego "Eugen Rapp", a cycle that is also known as the Schwäbische Chronik.

Catherine Lacey (author) american writer

Catherine Lacey is an American writer.

<i>Storm Still</i>

Storm Still is a 2010 play by the Austrian writer Peter Handke. The narrator, with traces of Handke himself, looks back at the National Socialist era, when one Slovenian family in Carinthia collaborates with the Germans, while another opposes them.

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist.

Peter Hamm German writer and literary critic

Peter Hamm was a German poet, author, journalist, editor, and literary critic. He wrote several documentaries, including ones about Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. He wrote for the German weekly newspapers Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, among others. From 1964 to 2002, Hamm worked as contributing editor for culture for the broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk. He was also a jury member of literary prizes, and critic for a regular literary club of the Swiss television company Schweizer Fernsehen.

References