ABSTRACT
Keep the title—Absence—in mind while reading this difficult yet strangely mesmerizing novel by the Austrian writer Peter Handke (b. 1942). Like the German word Abwesenheit, “absence” etymologically means “the state of being away,” and the four characters (an old man, a woman, a soldier, and a gambler) indeed remain at a distance from “a center” that they can intuit but rarely attain. “Whenever in my life I have thought I arrived, at the summit, in the center,” declares the old man, “it has been clear to me that I couldn’t stay.... There is no permanence in fulfillment.” Published in German in 1987, Die Abwesenheit has been translated with characteristic rigor and smoothness by Ralph Manheim.
