Storm Still

Peter Handke is a major figure in Austrian literature, and his fiction, poetry and drama have been shaped by some of the most turbulent events of modern history. Yet his mother loomed even larger in his work. Her life stretched across the Weimar Republic, both world wars and the postwar consumer economy.

Storm Still was Handke's most recent work at the time of publication, and in it he returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. On the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria's Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of one family meet and talk. The play is composed as a series of monologues. It chronicles both the Slovene minority's fight against Nazism and their love of the land.

The work gives a panorama reaching back to the author's bitter roots in the region. It blends penetrating prose with poetic drama to explore Handke's personal history, taking up themes from his earlier books and revisiting some of their characters. Times of conflict and peace, war and prewar, and even the seasons shift and overlap. The fate of an orchard comes to stand for the fate of a people.