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On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is Peter Handke's evocative, moving, often fantastic novel about one man's conflict with himself and his journey toward resolution. During one night shift, an unnamed, middle-aged pharmacist in Taxham, an isolated suburb of Salzburg, tells his story to a narrator. The pharmacist is known and well respected, but lonely and estranged from his wife. He feels most comfortable wandering about in nature, collecting and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. One day he receives a blow to the head that leaves him unable to speak, and the narrative is transformed from ironic description into a collection of sensual impressions, observations, and reflections. The pharmacist, who is now called the driver, sets out on a quest, traveling into the Alps with two companions-a former Olympic skiing champion and a once famous poet -where he is beaten and later stalked by a woman. He drives through a tunnel and has a premonition of death, then finds himself in a surreal, foreign land. In a final series of bizarre, cathartic events, the driver regains his speech and is taken back to his pharmacy-back to his former life, but he is forever changed. A powerful, poetic exploration of language, longing, and dislocation in the human experience, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House reveals Handke at his magical best.

"[A] spare, austerely written fable that evokes, in an absolutely deadpan style, the poignancy of human loneliness and isolation....As an assemblage, these images have the capacity to haunt, to make one ponder, even as the extreme neutrality of Mr. Handke's writing has an anesthetizing effect and makes one yearn for less purity and a good old-fashioned plot."

Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 11/29/2000

"Introspection is certainly something Peter Handke achieves in ON A DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE. But what often looks like standard modernist alienation--the withholding of names and specifics, a flat and artificial prose style, and so on--may be a realistic rendering of a quietly troubled soul.....It cannot be read as a description of...an episode in someone's life, but it suggests something of what that episode might have felt like; it rejects overt experimentation, metafictionality and so forth, but contrives to set you thinking about the mechanics, and--if you like--the philosophy of writing.

Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement, 12/22/2000

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