The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior: A Novel

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke--one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works

On a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters--with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day--are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait.

In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.

Author: Peter Handke
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 03/15/2022
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780374906504


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2022 pg. 1
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2022
Publishers Weekly 01/31/2022
Booklist 03/01/2022 pg. 22

About the Author

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as The Moravian Night, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Repetition. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence, and cowrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders's Wrong Movie and Wings of Desire. He won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Krishna Winston, now retired from teaching German literature and environmental studies at Wesleyan, has been translating the work of Peter Handke since 1993. Her many other authors include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Günter Grass, Christoph Hein, and Werner Herzog