The prerequisites for a conversation between Peter Handke and Peter Hamm were frankly ideal, since they have known each other for more than forty years and have long been close friends. In this sustained dialogue, the interlocutors are not author and critic face to face, but both authors who began their literary path in the sixties and who reflect, one and the other, the creative process with extraordinary precision; Handke, beyond his own work, also as a translator and as an essayist who writes about other writers, and Hamm as a sensitive and learned reader, like few others.

When Peter Hamm asks Handke about the influence of his childhood, his mother, his years at boarding school and university, about his literary beginnings, about Kafka, about Wim Wenders and Thomas Bernhard, about Yugoslavia, Germany and Spain, from the relationship between prayer and poetry, it is immediately evident that he knows the work of the other in all the details. In this way, he opens a space for conversation in which Peter Handke develops with extreme and unknown sincerity, grateful for the hand that Hamm extends to him even if it annoys him, but at all times looking for the correct formulation and even ironic about himself.

The pretext for these conversations was the shooting of the film about Peter Handke, The Melancholic Gambler, by Peter Hamm. The fact that this dialogue took place in an atmosphere of apparent calm gives it a literary rhythm that gives a glimpse of what today can be called literature.