Peter Handke’s Tale of the Telling of the Tale

By this level within the assessment, the reader is completely justified in demanding a solution to a key query: What’s the story? Nicely, it’s a narrative of two halves, or slightly two distinct phases of unequal size. (There are not any chapter breaks, though in contrast to his extra misanthropic compatriot Thomas Bernhard, Handke a minimum of lets us pause for breath between paragraphs.) Because the novel begins, a author who, like Handke, lives in a village exterior Paris units out one August afternoon throughout the capital and into the Picardy area. Observing his environs as he goes, he sporadically refers to a younger girl he calls “the fruit thief” who additionally appears to have gone on an identical journey into the nation’s northern provinces. This “fruit thief” — we later be taught her title is Alexia — appears at first to be his psychological picture of the protagonist in a novel he intends to write down, or slightly, is writing. It turns into obvious that in tracing her steps, actual or imagined, throughout inland France, he’s writing his approach into her and thus conjuring the novel into being. Briefly, Handke doesn’t simply give us the story, but in addition, as was the vogue within the days of Milan Kundera and literary postmodernism, the imagining of the story and the circumstances from which it emerged.

The France that the narrator travels by means of is recognizably one of many current previous, nonetheless in shock after the jihadist atrocities — a nation at conflict, but “silent and paralyzed with terror.” As his practice exits Paris, a noise startles the narrator and his fellow passengers: “Concern was in all our bones. … If nothing else, we contemporaries had one thing in frequent now.”

I’d have gotten on higher with this ebook if Handke had continued together with his first-person peregrination, putting off the fictive conceit in favor of one thing akin to his 1996 Serbian travelogue, “A Journey to the Rivers” (the form of ebook that, in his Nobel Prize speech, Handke referred to as “my narrative excursions or one-man expeditions”). Nevertheless, a unidirectional shift happens some 75 pages in: Instantly the wanderer is now not considering intermittently of Alexia, however has eliminated himself from the stage with a view to inform her story. The phantom limb ache of anticipating that we are going to revert to the “I” perspective fades into an acceptance that we’re caught with Alexia for the rest. The younger girl is roaming by means of Picardy searching for her mom, having lately returned from an impromptu voyage to Siberia. Whereas there isn’t any scarcity of descriptive colour and incident, albeit of a low-voltage selection (a dance with an innkeeper, some dialogues with a dismal boy named Valter, and so forth), this lengthy stretch — the majority of the novel — is, frankly, arduous going.

As an avant-garde firebrand within the Sixties, Handke wrote an “anti-play” titled “Offending the Viewers,” however now his technique has shifted perilously near Boring the Viewers to Tears. Very similar to the narrator imagining the character of the fruit thief, I stored making an attempt to examine a subset of readers who genuinely discover these things pleasant. Missing a lot of the parts that draw individuals to fiction — perception, suspense and so forth — it falls to both the language or the narrative materials itself to make the novel definitely worth the reader’s whereas. Though each have their moments — a mad speech within the last pages, an interlude at an inn that takes on the lighting and environment of previous European people tales — the meal served up by this deeply eccentric novelist is spare and saltless, with no wine and no dessert. I think it’s the future of such an uncompromising author as Peter Handke to finish up writing principally for an viewers of 1. His most loyal readers, maybe, undertake an angle of veneration, hushed and solemn and kind of bored, the way in which many individuals attend Mass.