I am not sure what this book is about. I never detected a story line, and never noticed the main characters. The prose is very readable, in Handke's typical style, but unlike most of his other works, I did not get into this book. Some of Handke's book are like that, just endless. cool, observations, so I still enjoyed reading it on the basis of style, but I did not discover the elements mentioned on the flap text. ( )

On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House is another exquisitely enigmatic and thought-provoking novel from Austrian fiction writer and playwright Peter Handke, who has written many works dissecting man's relationship with his surroundings and reshaping the writer's relationship with language and meaning. In this novel an unnamed pharmacist living in Taxham--an undistinguished enclave outside Salzburg--seems to be a spectator of his own life, which revolves around his pharmacy and the time he spends at home. At a certain point he leaves his house, drives into the forest near an airfield, parks the car and gets out. Here, amidst a series of strange and dreamlike sensory experiences, he is hit on the head, a violent event that renders him mute. In the next scene he goes to a restaurant where he meets a long forgotten Olympic skier and a poet, formerly of some note but whose reputation has languished, and the three men set out on an adventure together, with the pharmacist as driver. They travel through the mountains, encounter a woman who beats and later stalks the pharmacist, and then enter a weird apparently Spanish landscape where ultimately they separate. The pharmacist continues alone, wandering across a vast bleak steppe region before arriving home, recovering his power of speech along the way. Here, in the back room of his pharmacy, he narrates the story of his journey to the writer, who sets it all down in this book. An absorbing if perplexing novel that makes no concessions to narrative convention or reader expectation and does not strive for the kind of coherence we normally encounter in a work of fiction. Handke is, after all, seeking a different effect, one that lifts the reader out of his malaise and prods him to wonder what the writer is getting at. In this, he succeed brilliantly. ( )

A strange, but rewarding book. I must admit I had hoped for a few more obvious/explicit conclusions towards the end, but the book's meditative style did plenty for me in terms of being just that - a meditation. ( )