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    The Left-Handed Woman: A Novel
    The Left-Handed Woman: A Novel
    The Left-Handed Woman: A Novel
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    The Left-Handed Woman: A Novel

    By Peter Handke

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother in Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman.

    One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. And instinctively Marianne knows she must fend for herself and her young son now, before that time comes.

    She sends Bruno away and settles down to a life alone, at first experiencing moments of panic, restlessly wandering in rooms grown stifling. The stillness of the house wears her down, and she starts taking long walks, or visiting with her close friend, Franziska.

    Gradually, what began as a selfish escape from the prospects of the future becomes in fact liberation. The environment she'd always hated--a no man's land of identical houses, with all curtains drawn--recedes; her relationships with those dear to her become less threatening, less necessary; and Marianne finds a new pattern for her life and the strength to go on alone.

    Handke adapted the novel himself into a film of the same name in 1978.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 1, 1978
    ISBN9781466806962
    The Left-Handed Woman: A Novel
    Author

    Peter Handke

    Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

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    Reviews for The Left-Handed Woman

    3.5/5

    89 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Korte novelle: een vrouw breekt plots met haar man, hoewel alles goed lijkt te gaan; ze vervalt in eenzaamheid (ondanks de aanwezigheid van een kind). Handke beschrijft dit zeer afstandelijk, alsof alle personages wezenloze robotten zijn. Dit geeft een heel vervreemdend en vreemd effect, zowel in de leeservaring van de lezer, als in de beschreven existentiële ervaring van de personages. Het toneelmatige van de novelle (misschien heel logisch bij een toneelauteur) komt heel geforceerd over. Niet zo geslaagd dus.
    • 2/5
      Korte novelle: een vrouw breekt plots met haar man, hoewel alles goed lijkt te gaan; ze vervalt in eenzaamheid (ondanks de aanwezigheid van een kind). Handke beschrijft dit zeer afstandelijk, alsof alle personages wezenloze robotten zijn. Dit geeft een heel vervreemdend en vreemd effect, zowel in de leeservaring van de lezer, als in de beschreven existenti?le ervaring van de personages. Het toneelmatige van de novelle (misschien heel logisch bij een toneelauteur) komt heel geforceerd over. Niet zo geslaagd dus.
    • 3/5
      Glimpses in a women's everyday life, some insightful reflections on life, living with the consequences of one's life altering decision.
    • 4/5
      Peter Handke an Austrian by birth won the 2019 Nobel prize for literature. It was a controversial choice because of the Authors pro-Serbian attitudes particularly his support for Slobodan Milošević. Die linkshädige Frau (The Left Handed Woman) was published in 1977. It is a novella with a style very much it's own, perhaps this is because it started out life as a movie script for a film Handke directed in 1978 and he adapted the script for his book.It has a flat style of storytelling with the author keeping his characters at arms length. They say things and they do things and it is left to the reader to fill in the the thoughts of the inner person. The themes of the book are isolation and loneliness which Handke emphasises by his descriptions of the environment in which they live. The central character is Marianne whom the author refers to throughout as "the woman" who has a small son Stephan referred to as "the child". She is married to Bruno who spends some time away from home travelling because of his work. He returns from a longish trip to say that he will not be travelling much more for his job and suggests they go out to celebrate in a restaurant. They eat and drink and decide to spend the night in a hotel, they return home the next day and "the woman" tells Bruno that she wants him to leave. She is aware of a relationship with a female friend of theirs and he moves in with this other woman (Franziska) Marianne settles down to life on her own with her son, she takes up her old career as a translator a job that allows her to work from home. She has visits from the editor of the publishing house who always brings a bottle of champagne, but she does not enter into any sort of relationship with him. Marianne's life settles into a new pattern of working or not working, talking to her son and watching the world go by from her picture window at the front of the house. She lives on a housing estate where many of the houses look alike, it is winter and often there are flakes of snow falling from the cold air. She occasionally sees Bruno and Franziska in the commercial centre of the town, but apart from Franziska suggesting she joins a local women's group for support, their conversations are perfunctory. Marian's thoughts and moods are more in tune with the winter landscape; the forest that almost intrudes into her back garden. She takes Stephan for a walk in the snow up onto a forested hill behind their house, they are alone, they collect some kindling and make a fire, then return to the house. However much a person wishes to be alone it is not always possible, there must be some human contact and Marianne cannot avoid all of the life that passes around her and her son. The omnipresent author tells his story of the small group of people living their lives almost in isolation. The landscape, the housing estate seems to put a distance between them that is captured well by Handke. The book is all about an atmosphere, a cold way of living, almost alien in its coldness. It is a short book that strikes me as a commentary on life in the new towns that were a feature in Europe after the second world war. It does all it needs to do in it's short length. It was originally published in German and I read a French translation. In my opinion its worth a look if you are in the right mood and so 3.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman comes across as experimental fiction, and whether it succeeds or fails is probably best left up to the reader. In this ultraslim novel the characters' motivations are left mostly unstated and their emotional responses are muted to a deliberately excessive degree. Marianne is married to Bruno and they have a young son. When Bruno returns from a business trip, happy to be home with his family, Marianne surprises him and herself by asking him to leave: she knows he is going to leave her eventually and wants it over with sooner rather than later, but how she knows this is never addressed. In any case Bruno moves out, and Marianne is left in the house with their son. She returns to her former career as a translator. Handke might be exploring the idea of a woman alone, surviving independently and being emotionally autonomous, girding herself against the well-intentioned interference of friends. Marianne drifts like a ghost from one encounter to the next, deflecting the advances of men and enduring the kindly advice of female friends. But in the end she is alone, and Handke makes it enormously difficult for the reader to determine if she is happy or sad about this. Handke turned this novel into a screenplay and in 1978 directed the film himself.
    • 2/5
      I can't remember if I actually liked this book, or merely thought that I did. I was certainly, at the time, impressed with the short, punchy sentences and five-year-old's vocabulary used by the author so authoritatively. I was drawn in by the power of the style, but sadly this is one of those styles that impresses quickly but only briefly, rather like Pepsi in a taste-test.

    Book preview

    The Left-Handed Woman - Peter Handke

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    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    Also by Peter Handke

    Copyright Page

    She was thirty and lived in a terraced bungalow colony on the south slope of a low mountain range in western Germany, just above the fumes of a big city. She had brown hair and gray eyes, which sometimes lit up even when she wasn’t looking at anyone, without her face changing in any other way. Late one winter afternoon she was sitting at an electric sewing machine, in the yellow light that shone into the large living room from outside. One entire side of the room consisted of a single pane of glass, looking out on the windowless wall of a neighboring house and on a grass-overgrown terrace with a discarded Christmas tree in the middle of it. Beside the woman sat her eight-year-old son, bent over his copybook, writing a school essay at a walnut table. His fountain pen scratched as he wrote, and his tongue protruded from between his lips. Now and then he stopped, looked out of the window, and went on writing more busily than ever. Or he would glance at his mother, who, though her face was averted, noticed his glance and returned it. The woman was married to the sales manager of the local branch of a porcelain concern well known throughout Europe; a business trip had taken him to Scandinavia for several weeks, and he was expected back that evening. Though not rich, the family was comfortably well off, with no need to think of money. Their bungalow was rented, since the husband could be transferred at any moment.

    The child had finished writing and read aloud: ‘My idea of a better life. I would like the weather to be neither hot nor cold. There should always be a balmy breeze and once in a while a storm that makes people huddle on the ground. No more cars. All the houses should be red. The trees and bushes should be gold. I would know everything already, so I would not have to study. Everybody would live on islands. The cars along the street would always be open, so I could get in if I happened to be tired. I would never be tired any more. They wouldn’t belong to anyone. I would always stay up at night and fall asleep wherever I happened to be. It would never rain. I would always have four friends, and all the people I don’t know would disappear. Everything I don’t know would disappear.’

    The woman stood up and looked out of the smaller side window. In the foreground a line of motionless pine trees. Below the trees several rows of individual garages, all as rectangular and flat-topped as the bungalows. The driveway leading to the garages had a sidewalk, and though it had been cleared of snow a child was pulling a sled along it. Down in the lowland, far behind the trees, lay the outskirts of the city, and from somewhere in the hollow a plane was rising. The woman stood as if in a trance, but instead of going stiff she seemed to bend to her thoughts. The child came and asked her what she was looking at. She didn’t hear him, she didn’t so much as blink. The child shook her and cried, Wake up! The woman shook herself, and put her hand on the child’s shoulder. Then he, too, looked out and in turn lost himself, openmouthed, in the view. After a while he shook himself and said, Now I’ve been woolgathering like you. They both began to laugh and they couldn’t stop; when their laughter died down, one started up again and the other joined in. In the end they hugged each other and laughed so hard that they fell to the floor together.

    The child asked if he could turn on the television. The woman answered, We’re going to the airport now to meet Bruno. But he was already turning on the set. The woman bent over him and said, Your father has been away for weeks. How can I tell him that … The child heard nothing more. The woman made a megaphone with her hands and shouted as if she were calling him in the woods, but the child only stared at the screen. She moved her hand back and forth in front of his eyes, but the child bent his head to one side and went on staring openmouthed.

    The woman stood in the space outside the garages in her open fur coat. Puddles of melted snow were freezing over. The sidewalk was strewn with the needles of discarded Christmas trees. While opening the garage door, she looked up at the colony and its tiers of box-shaped bungalows, some of which were already lighted. Behind the colony a mixed forest—most!y oaks, beeches, and pines—rose gently, unbroken by any village, or even a house, to the top of one of the mountains. The child appeared at the window of their housing unit, as her husband called the bungalow, and raised his arm.

    At the airport it wasn’t quite dark yet; before going into the terminal, the woman saw bright spots in the sky over the flagpoles with their shimmering flags. She stood with the others and waited, her face expectant and relaxed, open and self-possessed. Word came over the loudspeaker that the plane from Helsinki had landed, and soon the passengers emerged from behind the customs barrier, among them Bruno, carrying a suitcase and a plastic bag marked Duty-Free Shop. He was just a little older than she, and his face was drawn with fatigue. He wore, as always, a double-breasted gray pin-striped suit and an open shirt. His eyes were so brown that it was hard to see his pupils; he could watch people for a long time without their feeling looked at. He had walked in his sleep as a child, and even now he

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