Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to two white Europeans: Olga Tokarczuk (one of the odds-on favorites going into the announcement) for 2018 (aka the “Year that the Sexual Abuse Scandal Killed the Nobel”) and Peter Handke for 2019.

I never wanted to write a Nobel Prize post—these posts are meant to be about baseball and the process of reading. About using different outlooks (like Big Data and sabermetrics) to come up with fun, weird ways to provoke people to think about books and publishing in a more nuanced, different way. Do they succeed? Probably not! But I’ll be back soon with a “normal” post about reading Saer’s The Regal Lemon TreeĚý(forthcoming from Open Letter in winter 2020) without any recollection of what the book was about and being totally knocked sideways on several occasions, wishing someone elseĚýwas in charge of writing jacket copy so that I could get a handle on what this book wasĚý˛ą˛ú´ÇłÜłŮ.Ěý

But for today? Let’s talk about fascism, two moments in history, and whether the Nobel Prize is totally bankrupt or not.

*

Scene: Thursday Morning. 4:30am. I wake up in an excited panic. There was speculation that Can Xue or Dubravka Ugresic could win the Nobel Prize. The committee had stated, publicly—although, as we came to find out, facetiously—that they had been too Eurocentric and would be looking to other parts of the globe for their big honor. So, Can Xue? Or Murakami? Probably Murakami. And probably Olga Tokarczuk—the committee will want to be “of the moment,” and given the way the English-speaking world serves as the de facto force behind what is popular and trendy (both of the recent titles from Tokarczuk to come out in English translation are from 2007 and 2009, but we’ll come back to that in her section), it felt like a foregone conclusion.

Text conversation with Will Evans after his Braves went down 10-0 in the top of the 1st inning.

In the midst of a Cardinals blow out in game 5 of the NLDS (which is pretty much the pinnacle of hope and joy for me) I had a dream moment . . . a second where I thought, “what if?” I mean, a Swedish (!!) press had contacted us about Can Xue’s rights earlier in the week—just as her odds shifted. Is that’s a coincidence? A conspiracy? A reason for hope? A prank??

But deep down, I knew. IĚýknew. Would it be great to sell more copies in a week than we have in all eleven years of our notable, but financially suspect existence? Fuck and yes it would! But, you, know, there are only like 50 other living authors equally deserving of a million dollar literary award and a place in history . . . it all feels like a coin flip, and there are three things I don’t think exist in today’s world: true democracy, anything resembling meritocracy, and good luck for anything Chad W. Post is involved in.

It took until 4:36am to figure out what the time it was in Sweden—not time for the announcement!—and then it took until 6ish to finally fall asleep, cautiously hoping that I’d wake up and the world would be a different place.

Fast-forward to 7:15am. ±á˛ą˛Ô»ĺ°ě±đ!Ěý±á˛ą˛Ô»ĺ°ě±đ!ĚýSure, he’s an Important European Author, butĚý±á˛ą˛Ô»ĺ°ě±đ!ĚýThis guy was friends with Slobodan Milošević, who, if you’re too young to know the history of the Yugoslav War and his attempts at genocide, well, let’s just say he’s one of history’s greatest monsters. Full stop. Don’t @ me with equivocations. If you encourage people to slaughter others based on their nationality, you are 100% a piece of shit.

Are Handke’s books good? I haven’t read all of the recent ones, but the early ones are, yes. Really good. But ¸é±đ±č±đłŮľ±łŮľ±´Ç˛ÔĚýis boring and solipsistic, and the second-half of his career feels like someone so intent on loving themselves that they don’t realize how far up their own ass they are.

From Wikipedia, which I’m quoting because . . . well, you’ll see:

My Year in the No-Man’s-BayĚý(:ĚýMein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht) is a 1994 novel by the Austrian writerĚý. It follows a writer’s attempt to describe a metamorphosis he went through two decades earlier, when he stopped being confrontative and instead became a passive observer. The task proves to be difficult and most of the book is instead concerned with the lives of the narrator, his family and the people in the Paris suburb where he lives. The book is 1066 pages long in its original German. It was published in English in 1998, translated byĚý.

When the English translation was published in 1998,Ěý‘s critic wrote: “Despite attaining moments of stylistic lucidity worthy ofĚý, the narrator more often comes across as gloomy and hostile. Nonetheless, numerous trenchant moments of insight make this work intriguing and provocative.”ĚýĚýreviewed the book forĚý. He described it as “one carefully observed image after another expanding into a cinematically eternal present tense”, which according to Siegel means that “in a sense, then, Handke’s novel is an argument for the superiority of film to the novel”. The critic continued: “Though at times intellectually bracing, this can make for pretty arid reading. And Handke’s attempts at elevating his epic of self-regarding banality often make matters worse. Rejecting character, plot and psychology as mere fictions, he relies on an ostentatious thematic framework that winds up being more implausible than any old-fashioned novelistic trick.” Publishers WeeklyĚýcalled the English translation “impeccable”, while Siegel called it “clumsy and overliteral”.

Yeah, I’m good. I’ve read this sort of man for many many years. And I really, really liked it. But then again, there are a million dudes writing in this same way, who may not get the international play (why do some writers succeed and not others? definitely not because of talent, I’ll guarantee you that), none of whom told Bosnian Muslims that the was faked and said “You can stick your corpses up your arse!” when called out on his wild claims. Christ. This guy. Really. A łľľ±±ô±ôľ±´Ç˛ÔĚýdollars.

And that’s just the start of it! Here are the screen caps I frantically took at a red light, driving my son to school, ˛őłŮłÜ˛Ô˛Ô±đ»ĺĚýthat anyone who’s openly friends with war criminalsĚýwon the Nobel Prize for Literature:

I know it’s long, butĚýread this. AndĚýread it here.ĚýWhy? Because it’s been completely deleted from Wikipedia. Not bits and pieces—the whole thing. .

The victors write history. Which is why “Never Forget” is not a phrase, but a warning.

*

While at that same red light, I whipped off an ill-conceived tweet (when are my tweetsĚý˛Ô´ÇłŮĚýill-conceived) and gotĚýso worked upĚýabout the podcast Tom Roberge and I were about to record. It’s called “Don’t Give a Million Dollars to a Fascist” and it is FIRE.

It also earned me the designation—on Twitter, the home of all intellectual thought?—as the “most insufferable man in publishing.” Which is AMAZING. I added this to my bio and will be riding it to the grave.

Chad W. Post, the “most insufferable man in publishing” died on XX in the year XXXX. He is known for: a) being blocked by Roxane Gay because of a drunken Super Bowl exchange regarding a half-time show, shitty referees, and nonsense (which he regretted all his years), b) complaining on Three Percent that no one liked his books (making it easier not to like his books), and c) the fact that he was very, very short, with a nasty balding situation.

I get the ire. The backlash to the “Handke doesn’tĚýdeserve it” backlash. I really do. There are authors I/we like that are not good people. And the work and the human who makes the work are two separate things—when you’re talking just about books. When you’re talking about giving someone a million dollars and a permanent spot in history? . . . I’m not so sure that argument holds. Or maybe it would’ve held, if the committee hadn’t had said anything. Instead of expanding their scope to, I don’t know, anyone in Latin America? Asia? Africa? Last I checked, Poland and Austria were very, very European. (And don’t pull this “Eastern Europe” shit. The center of Europe moved East very fast with Brexit.) And very, very, very white.

The thing is, you can claim that the Nobel is only about an author’s work, that the work is not the same as the person, but for an award of this stature that’s given out once a year to an author and their corpus, it comes to function as an award for the author themselves—at least in the minds of tens of thousands of people around the world. So whether you feel like the Nobel Prize for Literature should “only be about the work” or not, it functions as something larger within culture, and as a result, the Swedish Academy needs to keep that in mind.

I think someone subtweeted about me, claiming that my Handke outrage was linked to the fact that Dubravka Ugresic didn’t win. This isn’t entirely true. Am I upset that Dubravka didn’t receive the prize? Not exactly. Once you’ve been a bridesmaid for so long, it’s impossible to get angry when you miss the bouquet once again. But I am irritated on her behalf, since anyone who suffered through the Yugoslav War will 100% have their PTSD triggered when a genocide apologist who supported war criminals is awarded a million dollars. Especially women who suffered horribly through this conflict. It’s really cool that some white Austrian can take a shit on a region, and still be rewarded for it. Bully for him. It’s like telling Trump that “it’s OK, at least you’re trying.”

Dubravka was literally threatened by nationalists of the Handke sort. She was doxed in the national paper. People thought it was their patriotic duty to threaten her physically. Her work is still discriminated against because she’s not on board with ugly nationalist sentiments. She’s written more about border crossings, immigration, the impact of violence in the Balkans, the power of art, creation and the culture industry, than any living writer.

So, sure, Handke is a very talented Classic Male European Writer, but given the Academy’s statements, the scandal last year, the fact that most people think of them as a joke—a group of old white men selecting the buddies and idols they’d like to hang out with—that the impact of their decision far exceeds what it rationally should, that it would’ve been easy to choose anyone else . . . That’s why people say #EatShitHandke and #GivetheNobeltoDubravka. (No one actually says that, but they could and should. Hell, add #BoycottTheNobel to that.)

Again, white middle-aged literary guys—I’m one of you. I’m all about Art First. About complicated prose that’s contemplative and very wedded to History and Ideas. I’m all of those things, and I know why you’re pissed at the backlash against Handke, who embodies this very particular viewpoint more than anyone else I can name. (Just look at his pictures and you know what his books are like.) But you’re wrong this time. This isn’t the moment to try and stand for that argument. We live in the worst possible timeline, with everything completely falling apart—to pour fuel on that fire in order to defend your rights to choose whichever White Euro Male you want to receive Alfred Nobel’s money? That’s just plain irresponsible.

Dubravka and Can Xue and Everyone Else has to wait another year. And next fall, we’ll all be disappointed again. It’s an impossible situation. And, man, if an author Open Letter published won? The “we don’t even know who this is” think-pieces would lead me to suicide or heart attack. (THAT IS NOT A JOKE.) Instead of stumping for Dubravka, I think what we should argue for is the complete dissolution of the Swedish Academy. They’ve outlived their usefulness, are a pathetic group of trolls, and can’t even explain their decisions in English.

Seriously, this is your defense of Handke?

for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.

You know what that sounds like? Senility.

Even a random word generator can do better.

*

On the flip side—and there are think pieces to be written about this, about the two sides to the Nobel coin—Olga Tokarczuk is great! I’ve met her in person, and she’s really fun. Besides, she has dreads, and her books are good. Her first translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is one of my favorite people to see at book parties. Jennifer Croft—who did Flights—and is working on The Books of JacobĚý(which would make a good Two Month Review book?) translates from PolishĚýandĚýSpanish, and received a for her memoir, ±á´Çłľ±đ˛őľ±ł¦°ě.ĚýThese are talented, deserving artists—congrats to all of you! (And all of Olga’s other translators. I don’t know who they are, but it should be noted that these books are available in more languages than just Polish and English.)

Without neglecting any of the current players in Olga Tokarczuk’s current English-language moment—Riverhead, Fitzcarraldo—I want to go back in time. To 2002. To when the world first discovered Olga’s writing.

2002 was the year that Tokarczuk’s fifth book,ĚýHouse of Day, House of NightĚýcame out from Granta UK in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation. One year later, it was available stateside from Northwestern University Press as part of their “” series, which, if you don’t already know and you like Euro-lit, get thee to a library and/or used book store.

I have two personal comments about this series, one that could get me in a lot of trouble if powerful people ever read this blog: 1) This series changed my reading life, and 2) It’s the reason Sessalee Hensley at Barnes & Noble doesn’t really carry our books. (“Translations don’t sell. I carried Northwestern for years.” That’s verbatim.)

ąó°ů´ÇłľĚýThe Guardian‘s review ofĚýHouse of Day, House of Night:

Olga Torkarczuk claims her place among the greats of Polish letters with House of Day, House of Night

What other nation can boast two living Nobel laureates – Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz – and, in the late Zbigniew Herbert, a poet at least their equal? Add to these Ryszard Kapuscinski, Slawomir Mrozek and Pawel Huelle and the debt we owe to Polish letters becomes clear. It’s a distinctive list that draws on a powerful collective faith and an irony that often seems the only sane approach to the cruel joke of Polish history.

With House of Day, House of Night, her first full-length work here,ĚýĚýcan rightfully take her place among these writers. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short narratives, found stories, hagiography and incidental observations and is a delight to read – wonderfully inventive and by turns comic, tragic and wise.

That’s some strong praise from aĚý±ą±đ°ů˛âĚýwell-respected source!

How did the Northwestern edition do?

From the Northwestern book page (which has the same reviews as Amazon.com):

When I whinge and whinge about how American book culture is stupid . . . yes, I’m being a pompous, insufferable dick. But, c’mon. That’s it? Nothing onĚýPublishers Weekly . . .Ěýwho LOVED her new books.

Is History nothing but a Tale of Good Timing? Or something more sinister? A way of making sure power stays in power? Or a cruel joke? It’s easy to lean into any of these interpretations—especially if you read this book (in 2003!) and pursued Olga for years, but have been denied for one person’s opinion or another’s. (What is it like to be self-confident?)

Let’s flash ahead to Olga’s best book:Ěý, which was translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones as well and published by the incomparable Twisted Spoon. (So many good books! So little attention from American booksellers/reviewers/readers. Personal recommendation: Ěýby Hermann Ungar.)

As you can see from ,ĚýPrimevalĚýgotĚýway way wayĚýmore play than House of Day, House of Night. Although, again, noĚýPW, but there isĚýBooklist.ĚýNoĚýNew York Times, but aĚýWords Without Borders review. TheĚýReview of Contemporary Fiction reviewed it (probably why I knew of this particular book) and World Lit Today, but, let’s be honest: today’s tastemakers don’t care about RCF or The Modern Novel, although check this blurb from Malvern Books (!!):

This is Primeval: an enclosed snow globe, a world in itself, which it may or may not be possible to ever leave. Outside, wars rise and then break like waves, disgorging soldiers and refugees through the border of Primeval, whose residents are swept up in the flood without always being entirely certain whether the outside world really exists. [. . .] History, in this novel that spans the bulk of the twentieth century, is a thing that happens elsewhere, a dream that, like Goya’s Sleep of Reason, gives birth to monsters.

No other indie bookstores have mentioned this title to me over the past nine years. But I did buy my copy from City Lights way back when.

*

What is history if not for its forgotten players?

Olga’s Nobel is going to be about Riverhead and Fitzcarraldo because, well, memory is short and immediate. And good for them! That tracks, makes sense, and will keep two admirable publishers publishing good books for decades to come. But if she’s such an obvious Nobel Prize candidate, why do her four English translations have these pub dates: 2002, 2010, 2018, 2019? Four books in 17 years? Here’s her bibliography (arranged as if by a madman on the “infallible” Wikipedia):

What are we even doing here? Is there a meaning or message behind the awarding of the Nobel Prize? Is it just random? Is it about trends and popularity and Man Booker Awards and glorification of those who got there at the right moment? Is History written not by the victors, but by the people with the best timing?

*

This is actually supposed to be a post about Susan Harris, editorial director of Words Without Borders, former editor-in-chief of Northwestern University Press, and publisher of threeĚýNobel Prize winners—all of which came after her tenure at NUP ended.

In addition to doing Olga Tokarczuk in 2003, she publishedĚýtwoĚýHerta Mueller books—Land of Green Plums, which she acquired paperback rights to from a commercial house, and Traveling on One Leg, which was hers alone—and a couple Imre Kertesz titles—FatelessĚýshe inherited, but Kaddish for an Unborn Child, she acquired. And, because she was “let go” in March 2002, just months before Kertesz won the Nobel Prize, her editorial contributions were erased from history. She got none of the profile pieces, none of the glory or recognition.

*

Except among us.

Thank you, Susan, and I can’t imagine how weird it must be to “win” three times, and yet . . . But then again, is there an organization focused on international literature that’s more respected than Words Without Borders? The Grandmother of All Websites, WWB is legit AF. They’re theĚýGrand StreetĚýof post-millennium publishing. Wait, you don’t know ·Éłó˛ąłŮĚýGrand Street is?

Handke, in addition to being a brilliant, occasionally controversial playwright and essayist, has for four decades written numerous brief, brilliant, piercing novellas (and two longer works of fiction, including his masterpiece My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay). These works have carried forward the tradition of intensely psychological German-language modernism (Handke is Austrian) and at the same time taken it in new, breathtaking, highly self-conscious directions. A simple recital of some of his titles — The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; A Moment of True Feeling; and the collection of journal entries The Weight of the World — is enough to capture the dual atmosphere of mournful angst and tender beauty in which his entire oeuvre is steeped.

So, the entrance of the title character in Don Juan: His Own Version is, for Handke, uncharacteristically lighthearted, even farcical:

. . . Don Juan came hurtling head over heels onto my property. He had been preceded by a sort of spear, or lance, that whizzed through the air in an arc and dug itself into the earth right at my feet. The cat, which was lying next to that spot on the grass, blinked a few times, then went right back to sleep, and a sparrow — what other bird could have pulled this off? — landed on the still quivering shaft, which then continued to quiver. In actuality the lance was just a hazel branch, slightly pointed at the tip, such as you could cut for yourself anywhere in the forests around Port-Royal.

The novella’s subtitle, which translates literally as something closer to “As Told by Himself,” is misleading for a few reasons, most obviously that Don Juan isn’t actually the narrator. We do not hear Don Juan directly describe his exploits — not even in quoted dialogue — but instead are told everything secondhand, by the chef. Additionally, the novella is not a retelling of the famous Don Juan legend depicted in the well-known play by Molière or the libretto of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Instead, Don Juan’s narrative spans the previous week, a period marked by encounters with several women. We get fewer details of each encounter than of the one before, ostensibly because they are significant to Don Juan only in the ways that they differ from each other. Also, we might suspect, Handke feels that each encounter is basically the same as the others. All that seems to interest him is the archetype.

The first of the week’s encounters is with a young bride in a village near Tblisi, Georgia, and the last is one about which we receive no details whatsoever. The intermediate encounters take place in far-flung cities — Damascus, Ceuta (North Africa), Bergen (Norway), and an unnamed city in Holland — due to Don Juan’s supernatural ability to travel quickly from one part of the world to another, in the company of his servant, the driver who initially met him at the Tblisi airport.

In order to characterize these encounters, the word “seduction” is studiously avoided. This is because, according to Don Juan himself (via the chef), he “was no seducer.” The chef explains:

He had never seduced a woman. He had certainly run into some who had accused him of doing so. But these women had either been lying or no longer knew what they were thinking, and had actually intended to express something altogether different. And conversely, Don Juan had never been seduced by a woman. Perhaps now and then he had let one of these would-be seductresses have their way, or whatever it was, only to make it clear to her in the twinkling of an eye that there was no seduction involved and that he, the man, was neither the seducee nor the opposite. He had a kind of power. But his power was of a different sort.

Perhaps his power is linked to the fact that this “version” of Don Juan is propelled not by lust or the urge to conquest, but by a profound sadness:

Don Juan was orphaned, and not in any figurative sense. Years earlier he had lost the person closest to him, not his father or his mother, but his child, his only child, or at least so it seemed to me. So one could also become an orphan when one’s child died, and how. Or maybe his woman had died, the only one he loved?

. . . What drove him was nothing but his inconsolability and his sorrow. To transport his sorrow to the world and transmit it to the world. Don Juan lived off his sorrow as a source of strength. It was bigger than he was and transcended him. Armored in it, so to speak, and not merely so to speak, he knew that although he was not immortal he was invulnerable. Sorrow was something that made him impetuous, and, in an opposite and equal reaction (or rather action by action), completely permeable and open to whatever might happen, while at the same time invisible when necessary. His sorrow furnished provisions for his journey. It nourished him in every respect. As a result he had no major needs. Such needs did not even rear their heads. . . . His sorrowing, fundamental rather than episodic, was an activity.

Indeed, Handke’s Don Juan is hardly the romancer and swashbuckler of legend but more of a tempered and introspective figure, much like the protagonists in many of Handke’s works since Slow Homecoming (1984). These characters are personified as wanderers — sojourners often suffering from unspecified psychological trauma, whose psychic survival seems to depend on their capacity to apprehend every last detail of their physical surroundings. This is why so much of Handke’s fiction is both mentally claustrophobic and expansively celebratory of nature, why it can feel at the same time so suffocatingly pessimistic about humanity and yet unguardedly optimistic that the soul may nevertheless flourish in a world that contains so much splendor. Toward the end of the novella, the chef captures some of this natural beauty:

In the hill forests around Port-Royal the edible chestnuts had just come into bloom, and the cream-colored strings of blossoms hung down among the dark oaks like crowns of foam atop waves, seething on all sides in the area surrounding the ruins, and from the silent surf rose, at the very top, back on the ĂŽle-de-France plateau, the pale red roof of the former cloister stables of Port-Royal, a roof with a tile landscape more beautiful and strange and yet dreamily familiar, as part of a barely discovered planet, than anything I had seen before, and the swallows swooping above it into the last sunlight moved twice as fast, as if propelled by the light.

Don Juan: His Own Version is an intriguing and frequently thought-provoking exercise. Although not on par with Handke’s earlier work, it contains many examples of his acutely self-aware and at times exquisitely gorgeous prose. Even, as here, when displayed only occasionally to its best advantage, Handke’s voice is strong and nearly unparalleled in contemporary world literature.

Dan Vitale—one of our new “contributing reviewers,” which is sponsored by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts—wrote this review. He’s a big Handke fan, and although this may not be Handke’s absolute best, it sounds pretty interesting:

Peter Handke’s latest novella to be published in English translation is narrated by a chef who operates and lives in an inn in the ĂŽle-de-France region outside Paris, near the ruins of the Port-Royal-des-Champs convent. Experiencing a period of solitude due to lack of business (all his neighbors — his potential customers — have moved away), he occupies his time reading. Thus, he is an ideal audience for a visiting storyteller who suddenly and fancifully appears in his garden: a visitor from another century and out of the pages of literature — the legendary lover Don Juan.

Handke, in addition to being a brilliant, occasionally controversial playwright and essayist, has for four decades written numerous brief, brilliant, piercing novellas (and two longer works of fiction, including his masterpiece My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay). These works have carried forward the tradition of intensely psychological German-language modernism (Handke is Austrian) and at the same time taken it in new, breathtaking, highly self-conscious directions. A simple recital of some of his titles — The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick; A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; A Moment of True Feeling; and the collection of journal entries The Weight of the World — is enough to capture the dual atmosphere of mournful angst and tender beauty in which his entire oeuvre is steeped.

So, the entrance of the title character in Don Juan: His Own Version is, for Handke, uncharacteristically lighthearted, even farcical.

Click here to read the full review.

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 attachĂ© 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 ±·°ż-˛Ń´ˇ±·â€™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 ±·°ż-˛Ń´ˇ±·â€™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 , 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] — Thomas McGonigle
2] — Guy Vanderhaegen
3] — Christopher Byrd

as well as to sites and blogs I and others run on Handke accessible via:

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.

———

MICHAEL ROLOFF 714-660-4445 Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:

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

Handke’s didactic refusal to let us make of his book what we will, his sedulous effort to keep us dizzy and confused, is, more than anything else, a way of infantalizing his readers. By the time we’re done, we’re feeling so put upon, so talked at, that it’s difficult to respond with anything but adolescent sullenness.