It tells the story of a successful female banker who makes a journey through the Sierra de Gredos mountain range in Spain to meet a famous author in La Mancha who will write her biography.

[2] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Christopher Byrd wrote: "Handke's aesthetic agenda in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is unmistakable.

It's executed by a form of philosophically inspired writing that leans less on existentialism, the go-to mode for many cerebral writers in the past, than on deconstruction.

By zeroing in on the many things adventure stories leave out - for instance, the quality of the soil that the hero treads underfoot - Handke subverts the genre, so as to unmask our complacency with cliches.

The result is a work that embraces a disciplined attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the matter of everyday life (before it vanishes forever?