Book details

The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

Author: Peter Handke; Translated from the German by Michael Roloff in collaboration with Karl Weber

The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

$11.99

About This Book

A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career

The first full-length play The Ride Across...

Page Count
272
On Sale
10/01/1976

Book Details

A collection of six plays by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, spanning the early years of the Austrian playwright's career

The first full-length play The Ride Across Lake Constance, is one of Handke's best-known works. It deals directly with one of Handke's favorite themes: the realities of theater itself, independent of the offstage world, and the way language (dialogue) and objects (props) operate in the skewed world of the stage.

Therein it anticipates They Are Dying Out, the second full-length play in this volume. In some ways more conventional than many of Handke's plays, They Are Dying Out presents one of his most fascinating protagonists, Quitt, a businessman who first induces a group of colleagues to set up a monopoly and then torpedoes the scheme.

The four short plays that round out the book--Prophecy, Calling for Help, Quodlibet, and My Foot My Tutor--were written before The Ride Across Lake Constance and show Handke moving from the experimental mode of his early work toward the richness and complexity that have marked him as the most important dramatist since Becket.

Together, Handke's plays bear witness to the truth of Richard Gilman's observation that "in Handke's theater, language, exposed, assaulted, wrestled with, driven to limits, and pursued still further, begins to take on, like the color returning to the cheeks of a nearly hanged man, the signs of a strange and unexpected resurrection."

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9781466807761

In The News

"Lake Constance describes the dream state, with interpersonal signals gone askew: the characters, famous actresses and actors, dance, exclaim over trivial objects, bicker, scratch their heads, and tell improbable anecdotes in an endeavor to identify some literal reality. ... Its [They Are Dying Out] hero Quitt, an eloquent, meditative tycoon who betrays his fellow monopolists, is one of the most complex characters in contemporary drama. He shouldn't be missed." - Kirkus Reviews

About the Creators

The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays

$11.99