Thursday, May 3, 2007

peter handke





Peter Handke is one of the authors that I've been reading for a while. Blogs "Dispatches from Zembla" and "Flowerville" have been punctuating a Handke debate for a while, along with an online workshop on Austrian Literature. So these are the two Handke novels that I'm selecting here . NYRB Classics Publishing House is doing a very important thing publishing and reediting several authors that are crucial to our time (as various as Pavese, Emilio Gadda, Henry James and Peter Handke). "A sorrow..." is a painful yet inspiring book (difficult to categorise: novel, memoir, testimony?) that takes Handke's mother death notice as the burning fuse of his reflexions. I couldn't help noticing Patricia Highsmith's introductory quotation (Ransom for a dog), in which the unexpectedness and apparent tranquility of the moment conceals the worst tragedies (an uncanny feeling that is fully described in Joan Didion's 'The year of magical thinking'). "Abcense" is a denser book and narrative than "A sorrow..." and focuses on a group of travelers through a series of landscapes that allow us to go back to biblic symbols. As usually with Handke, domestic and every day details surface in the narrative, enhancing the value of gestures, habits and even mannierisms along this novel. Handke's sequence is versatile and has allowed him to delve into diverse strategies: "Caspar Hauser" traces the mumblings of words and dislocated phrases through a wild kid bereft of language; "The Left'Handed woman" is a deft excercise of ventriloquism with a woman's sensibility and direction in the middle of a marital crisis, and "Essay on boredom" allows Handke to join the Spanish culture through a series of impressionistic notes...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is a great coverphoto on "A Sorrow beyond Dreams" - it is a bit of a strange translation in german it is 'wunschloses unglueck' which would probably be something like 'unwished unhappiness'....i was wondering, have you read the biography of Hihsmith? This is a book I am hunting for ages....the quote also reminds a bit of 'Edith's Diary'.

Nico said...

Hi Antonia, I have read everything by Pat Highsmith, and also that biography which is very very exhaustive, it's called "Beautiful shadow: a life of Patricia Highsmith" by Andrew Wilson.
(Published New York : Bloomsbury, 2003). In that book there's increidible data, and also several photos, one that keeps coming back to mind is the one in which she appears with her arms stretched, hands open and wearing a fake glasses with eyes painted on them. It's a great work. Also, I read an interesting book by one of her lovers, MaryJAne Meaker, very controversial, kind of romantic-soap-opera style, where Meaker details her affair and highlights Highsmiths's antisemitism and alcoholism. Kind of tacky in a way. About 'Edith's diary', what a book!! That's a tremendous novel, rare, because she usually avoided female protagonists, but that book left me stranded, so intense and depressive. I remember she even mentions the intervention of the USA in Chile, for the coup!

Anonymous said...

glad to hear that these are such good books. I must immediately look up whether they are in the library. Thanks!

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