Much like Kafka's Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, Peter Handke's protagonist in A Moment of True Feeling, Gregor Keuschnig, awakens one morning to find himself transformed. The difference in Keuschnig's case is that the transformation is purely internal. He has dreamed that he is a murderer, and with the desperation of a genuinely guilty man goes about his domestic, professional, and extra-curricular activities pretending that all is well, thinking that he must conceal the change he has undergone from those around him. He discovers however that his relationship with the world and the people in it has skewed. Normalcy is in the eye of the beholder, and Keuschnig's perceptions have grown hyper-sensitive. He sees portents and potential danger at every turn, in every set of eyes that light upon him and every object he comes across. As the day progresses he gives in to damaging impulses and expresses himself with a kind of spiteful honesty. The only person with whom he is able to behave "normally" is his daughter Agnes, who in her childish way accepts him as he is, does not question his behaviour, and from whom he feels no need to conceal anything. The novel ends abruptly, with Keuschnig estranged from his family, wandering the streets of Paris, living an existential nightmare with no end in sight. In A Moment of True Feeling Handke argues that we really know nothing of one another, that we live and work side by side but are isolated by the individual consciousness in which we are immersed. This shocking and wildly inventive novel can be horrifying and howlingly funny within a single scene. Probably the best of Handke's 1970s fictions. ( )