Peter Handke. 
 
Methuen: 1988. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. A thin layer of tanning along the edges of the jacket, and a few spots of trace foxing on the flaps. Book has foxing on the edges and the endpapers. Former owner's name and date of purchase written on the bottom-edge and stamped on the paste-down endpaper. Some pencil markings in the margins, an ink stain on the half-title page, and a quote from Kierkegaard carefully written out in ink on the opening page of epigraphs. 246 pages. Very good. 
 
Young Filip has two books that belonged to his missing brother - a handwriting exercise book and a Slovenian-German dictionary - and he sets out to Slovenia to find him. The last wrinkle in this novel's clever set up is that some of the words in the dictionary are intriguingly marked up. Filip is travels along the borders of Austria and Yougoslavia to Slovenia, but the true setting of the novel is the place between the names of things and our experiences of those things, the place where literary young men find who they really are. 
 
"A quarter of a century, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother. I was not yet twenty."