Estacada, Oregon is at an elevation of 426 feet above sea level, meaning its climate is not that different from the surrounding areas. I know, I have been there. This is an important point.
"Short Letter, Long Farewell" is a short novel written by Austrian writer Peter Handke, written in German as "Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied" in 1972 and released in English translation in 1974. It is a 170 page long "road trip" novel, describing the surreal but flat journey of an Austrian writer across the United States.
There is a certain genre of literature--- serious business literature, that focuses on an affectless narrator who describes both objective events and emotional processes, without managing to tie them into anything that the reader can empathize with. This is probably most famous in a book like The Stranger by Albert Camus. But of course in that book, that is the entire point. In this book, I don't know if the protagonists' lack of emotion is the point--or if Peter Handke is just a bad writer. At the very least, it is lucid, and told in clear prose, meaning that I got through the book in a day, as opposed to the last serious literature book by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature I read, which took me several weeks. So this book describes the protagonist, travelling from Providence, Rhode Island to Bel Air, California, at first by bus and car and later by airplane. In Philadelphia, he meets an ex-partner who has a two year old daughter, and they drive together to St. Louis, Missouri. There, he flies to various cities, visiting his brother's home in Estacada, Oregon, and then his estranged ex-wife meets him, kidnaps him, and they go to California to meet director John Ford, who explains the idea of America to them all. Despite the last sentence, the majority of the book is described in extremely prosaic terms, which I liked at first because I've eaten my share of diner food onboard Greyhound buses.
My objection to this book is based on three things: two of which came from the text, and the third of which I discovered reading about Handke after finishing.
The first is that having no idea of the character's motivations or basic character, and the disconnect between the different episodes of the book, started to seem "too clever by half". Sometimes a mysterious or indirect atmosphere can add a surreal charm to a book. But here, I started to wonder just what I was reading. What was the basic motivation, worldview, and character of the protagonist? After a while, I got the feeling that the author was smirking at me, and I got tired of trying to solve his boring riddle.
Secondly, Estacada is not at an elevation of "over 3,000 feet", but is at 426 feet. Near the ending of the book, the author describes a visit to Estacada, Oregon, which he describes as a snowbound lumbering town in the mountains. Estacada is in an area traditionally associated with timber, but it is at a little over 400 feet in elevation, and is (presently, and maybe in the 1970s) basically a suburb of Portland, accessible by city bus. This might seem like a small point, but if the one part of the book I was familiar with was inaccurate---what else was? Which of the other cities or towns in the book, described in detail, were totally made up? This book is about a European confronting and learning about America---but the America he visits is a creation in his own mind. The insight he gains is just restating a bunch of pretentious concepts, without any real experience to back them up.
Finally, after finishing this book, and wanting to research some basics (such as whether Handke had even visited the US at the time of writing), I found that when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019, it caused some controversy because he had been an apologist for war criminal Slobodan Milošević. Which made the fact that I couldn't stand this book a relief, of sorts, because I didn't have to hate the literary attempts of a good person. My objections to this book aren't totally separate from the issue of Handke's war crimes apologetics: in this book, he alters facts to match some type of pretentious romantic theory he has in his head, which was also seemingly the basis for his support of the Serbian leadership.
I don't really want to puzzle that one out, so my main take away from this is: Swedish Academy, just give Murakami his prize already.