The Clearing By Peter Steiner, Translated by Todd C. Hanlin

The Clearing is at once a point of departure and a point of return. The narrator grew up in this part of Austria with his grandparents, experienced the hardships of war and the eventual dissolution of his family during peacetime. He returns from his worldly travels as a mature man who now, in a single day, reconstructs his youth in the presence of the deserted inn where he first encountered the world. Reminiscent of the Austrian prose stylist Adalbert Stifter, Peter Steiner lovingly describes seemingly insignificant details of a young boy's life and environment with the explanation: "I tell stories that I have experienced or have heard about in my immediate surroundings. I try to conceptualize a picture that has a place for the reader, where the reader can feel at home."Peter Handke has written of the book:"There is a terrific scene in The Clearing where his father is released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia and returns home, pausing at the garden gate B and he doesn't immediately go in to his family, to his sons and his wife, but remains at the garden gate and kneels at the garden gate. He kneels down at the garden gate and holds the latch to the gate in his hand, and yet he doesn't come into the house, he just has the latch in his hand. That has made a lasting impression on me B for ever."Peter Steiner was born in Baden near Vienna in 1937. He has been an apprentice book printer, later a croupier, before finding his calling as a geologist; he served as a technical advisor for the United Nations, then as an independent mining consultant. Dr. Steiner has traveled the globe, and it can truly be said that he "changes countries more often than his socks." He began his first attempts at fiction in the 1980s, has written a dozen prose pieces since, and lives today as a freelance writer outside Vienna and New York City. The Clearing was first published in 1995. The translator, Todd C. Hanlin, professor of German at the University of Arkansas, has translated novels by Anton Fuchs, Gustav Ernst, Gerald Szyszkowitz, and Georg Potyka, several plays by Szyszkowitz, Felix Mitterer, and Fritz Hochwälder, as well as an Ariadne volume on The Best of Austrian Science Fiction.