A reader responds to the Handke review

Michael Roloff responded to our post about the review of Peter Handke’s CROSSING THE SIERRA DE GREDOS in the comments, but I think it deserves to be posted to the front page:

It is time readers of the New York Times Book Review were made aware of Handke, the prose writer, having gone through something like half a dozen changes. Starting of as a supremely playful demonstrator of the quelling of anxiety in his first three novels, only the third, GOALIE [1969], exists in English [in my translation], his nausea, once including words [he now fondle them] is not like Sartre’s idea-driven kind, but has psychosomatic origins; is the nausea produced by what for him is “the ugly;” no matter that it hits the same nerve. And that his hyper-sensitivities are uniquely his

If Mr. Gordon were as exacting as he says Handke is, he might have noticed that Handke already shifted to a more open hearted mytho-poeic, but equally if not more exacting, position in the 1975 LEFT HANDED WOMAN, [whose personae resembles that of the woman subject of the current DEL GREDOS] the book just preceding A SLOW HOMECOMING, whose Alaska section must be one of the most articulated responses to nature in world literature for its selectivity in naming.

What entered Handke’s writing shortly after HOMECOMING, in THE LESSON OF ST. Victoire, was the pictorial Cezanne re-arrangement of reality {“Close your eyes and see the world arise anew”, the opening sentence of his 1984 Salzburg novel ACROSS, provides a hint.}

With THE REPETITION [1987, “retrieval”] a book fabulously praised in The Guardian, the promised re-write of both his first novel, DIE HORNISSEN [1966], and of SORROW BEYOND DREAMS [1972 – Gordon even manages to find a negative take on Handke’s emotionally most immediately accessible highly praised book], Handke’s search [“I want to be someone like somebody else was once” KASPAR, 1968; OBIE 1972] rearranged his roots in his Slovenian grandfather and uncles’ region; which provides a hint to the unnecessarily baffled Professor Gordon why Handke might prefer a continuous existence of the Yugoslav Federation over its decimation into small consumer entities; his defense of the Serbs and Milosevic against the more customary “one devil” theory of history and journalism.

With the three narratives in THREE ESSAYS [especially ON THE JUKE-BOX, 1989], culminating in the six-sided weaving self-portrait of himself – as the once nauseated ex-cultural attaché Keuschnig [of 1974 A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING], as writer, painter-filmmaker, priest, stone mason, super-finicky misanthropic restaurateur, and reader, in the 1994 magnum opus ONE YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY, Handke demonstrated for stretches – he is the greatest of exhibitionists – the capabilities of narrative as pure writing music image, as he did already in the 1986 ABSENCE, a narrative that a reader experiences like film.

Subsequent to NO-MAN’S-BAY he then demonstrated that you could zoom like a camera, in the 1996 ONE DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE, into the mind of an apothecary, in the improbably named, Salzburg suburb Taxham, and make that fellow’s dream syntax absorb the readers’ projections, a feat worthy of the Joyce of FINNEGAN FUNAGAIN; and in his 2005 DON JUAN, the fugueing novella that followed the 2003 GREDOS he showed that you could write both forward and backward in time while standing in one place. – I know it is all a little much, the fellow just turned 65 and has published 60 books, and sometimes I wish I’d never set eyes on him, but he can’t help it, he must write to stay healthy; his symptom is his salvation. And it is that of real readers.

It matters little that the so other-opinion-oriented Mr. Brown’s search for “opinions” yields so little of note; or that Handke is the whipping boy of miserable reviewers chosen by overly busy editors. Gordon has searched poorly. REPETITION and NO-MAN’S BAY are regarded, rightly I think, as two of the great novels of the past hundred years, e.g. William Gass’s estimate of them. Since Gordon cites the Book Forum review, I would like to point out that as a professor of literature he might be aware of the classical tradition of Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert, Hermann Lenz and Bove in whose steps Handke, the last great walker on the earth, exerts himself as someone who is so infinitely of his medium’s contemporaneous possibilities; and to sensitive responses in the

1] LA TIMES — Thomas McGonigle
2] Washington Post — Guy Vanderhaegen
3] San Franciso Chronicle — Christopher Byrd

as well as to sites and blogs I and others run on Handke accessible via: http://www.handke.scriptmania.com

These not only contain a wealth of material, but there Handke, his own severest critic, also is critiqued on his own terms; and flinches at every lash of the whip!

Gordon’s reading of DEL GREDOS shows me that he is the wrong reader, responder for this book, written in large part to memorialize, salvage a landscape. He bristles at being shook up.

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MICHAEL ROLOFF 714-660-4445 Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freeservers.com/about.html

“MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!” {J. Joyce} “Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde” [von Alvensleben]