title: On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House
author:  Peter Handke 
description: Handke's stringent style of postmodern storytelling remains uncompromisingly austere in his latest novel, in which an unnamed protagonist goes on a directionless odyssey. Alienated from his wife and children, a middle-aged pharmacist with a preternatural sense of smell lives quietly in the parochial, suburbanized Austrian village of Taxham. His life revolves around mushroom gathering until a mysterious blow to the head renders him mute and sends him out into a progressively surrealDand often perilousDworld. With his protagonist's muteness keeping psychology at a distance, Handke (My Year in the No-Man's Bay, etc.) slips in and out of naturalism, satire, fable and allegory, strewing the book with fragments of fine writing as he follows the pharmacist across a dislocated European landscape. To add an extra dimension of self-consciousness to the chronicle, the pharmacist is relating his story retrospectively to an off-page narrator in one of the book's many instances of obstructed communication and hesitant introspection. For a time the pharmacist (who becomes known only as "the driver") is accompanied by two characters who hover between satiric and symbolic roles: a poet who has stopped writing and a former Olympic athlete. They encounter a series of menacing strangersDincluding a widow prone to fits of violenceDas well as figures from their pasts, but the pharmacist must complete his journey alone on a metaphysically windy steppe somewhere (perhaps) in Spain, where rules of space and time do not seem to apply. While there is a resolution, or at least an ending to the protagonist's enigmatic journey, Handke once again writes for a select audience that values impression over objective reality. (Nov.) <br />Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: **THIS PARTY’S GOT TO STOP**
  
  RUPERT THOMSON
  
  A MEMOIR
  
  GRANTA
  
  > > > > > To Peter Straus
  
  > Contents
  
    
  
  Title Page  
  Dedication  
    
  1965  
  Sorry If I Look Strange  
  He Didn’t Say Goodbye  
  Chubb  
  Call Me by My Proper Name  
  Death Pyjamas  
  Gravity Will Do the Rest  
  Parasites, Hangers-on and Layabouts  
  Under Uranus  
  A Helicopter Crash  
  The Sauce is Nice  
  Not What He Would Have Wanted  
  Horrible Trees  
  The Sticky Cherubs  
  Tumbleweed  
  Little Black Joe  
  Beautiful Day  
  Letter from Shanghai  
  Like a Reservoir  
  Last Nights  
  Moonlight Represents My Heart  
  The Burning Bed  
    
  Copyright  
  
  1965
  
  My mother spoke to me once after she was dead. Nine years old, I was standing
  outside our house, in the shadow of a yew tree, when I heard her call my name.
  It came from high up, and to my left, and I imagined for a moment that she was
  upstairs, but all the windows at the front of the house were closed, and there
  was nothing pale in any of those black rectangles, nothing to suggest a f