Peter Handke

By the 1980s Peter Handke had established himself as a storyteller who had rejected the conventions of storytelling and was more interested in recording and memorializing the traces that the writer leaves behind in his pursuit of story. In Repetition, it is 1960. 20-year-old Filip Kobal leaves his home in southern Austria and heads across the border into Slovenia (his family’s ancestral homeland) in search of his brother Gregor. Filip, 20 years younger than Gregor, has no actual memory of show more his brother, who fought in World War II, joined the resistance, and never returned home: all he possesses are stories shared by his parents and some elder townspeople and Gregor’s journal and dictionary. Filip’s journey, loosely following in his brother’s footsteps, leads him into a landscape that is both alien and familiar, and to a scattering of Slovenian towns and villages where he meets people who are, variously, sympathetic with and indifferent to his quest. Using the journal and his brother’s notations in the dictionary as a guide—and enlightened and motivated by Gregor’s fascination with language and geography—Filip ends up discovering his own close kinship with the land and language of his forebears. The story, as such, is neither straightforward nor action-oriented. Much of what “happens” is simply Filip wandering and observing, remembering events from his childhood, pondering history, reflecting on the possible meaning of what he sees and hears and otherwise witnesses, linking past to present, and looking forward, ruminating on an uncertain future. Repetition is an intensely cerebral novel, one that does not even attempt to incorporate customary storytelling elements like drama, plot and suspense: it seeks to engage on an intellectual rather than an emotional level. Or, one could conceivably argue, it does not care to engage, instead holding itself aloof from whatever the reader might or might not experience in its pages. It also adds a spellbinding, if puzzling, piece to Peter Handke’s uniquely challenging literary legacy. show less

It could be convincingly argued that much of what Peter Handke has written is actually about the process of writing, of finding words to describe what is, in many cases, indescribable. Most of his characters are searching for something that they are unable or can't be bothered to define. The search takes them from one place to another, on a random or circular journey that mirrors or mimics a process of discovery. The Afternoon of a Writer is another of these works, with the significant show more difference that the protagonist is a writer, and what's more, a character we are invited to take to be Handke himself. His journey begins with the recollection of a time when he thought he had "lost contact with language," when he had been unable to work and thus had lost his purpose in being alive. From his suburban house, where he is living contentedly with his cat, he roams into the (unnamed European) city, spends time at a cafe, where he encounters a drunk, who lectures him in an incomprehensible vernacular, and finally to a meeting with his translator, whose cheery disposition derives from no longer being a writer. This is Handke at his challenging and enigmatic best. The Afternoon of a Writer is the product of a restless and fertile mind that refuses to let anything go unquestioned. show less

Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman comes across as experimental fiction, and whether it succeeds or fails is probably best left up to the reader. In this ultraslim novel the characters' motivations are left mostly unstated and their emotional responses are muted to a deliberately excessive degree. Marianne is married to Bruno and they have a young son. When Bruno returns from a business trip, happy to be home with his family, Marianne surprises him and herself by asking him to leave: she show more knows he is going to leave her eventually and wants it over with sooner rather than later, but how she knows this is never addressed. In any case Bruno moves out, and Marianne is left in the house with their son. She returns to her former career as a translator. Handke might be exploring the idea of a woman alone, surviving independently and being emotionally autonomous, girding herself against the well-intentioned interference of friends. Marianne drifts like a ghost from one encounter to the next, deflecting the advances of men and enduring the kindly advice of female friends. But in the end she is alone, and Handke makes it enormously difficult for the reader to determine if she is happy or sad about this. Handke turned this novel into a screenplay and in 1978 directed the film himself. show less

Peter Handke is capable of producing some of the most delicate and lasting images in his prose. Late in the novel, narrator Filip Kobal, and later in life, reimagines his walks up the hills of the Karst region and his encounters with the winds. The wind, he says, takes him by the armpits and raises him up making his climb easier, whether as a headwind or a tailwind. A moment earlier, he says that this wind which comes from the sea only delivers with it an imaginary hint of its saltiness. But show more there on the summer slopes, it raises the aroma of all the herbs and plants growing there; these he says are real.

Real and imagined form a tension in this story. I confess, I have read this now three times. And each time, I read with a focus on something new. It is so richly detailed, so intricately constructed, that I can only concentrate on a few pages, or one dimension, at a time before surrendering to a kind of exhaustion from the effort. That has happened each time. I first read it decades ago. I saw it then as a young man’s adventure to search for his brother, a kind of familial kinship story. But I missed some of the significant details of who his family are, where they come from, and their sense of not fitting neatly into the southern Austrian alpine village where the narrator grew up near the border of Slovenia (also referred to as Yugoslavia, depending on the line of enquiry.)

The Kobals it seems had been in southern Austria since a rebellious ancestor Gregor Kobal led a peasant revolt in 1713, failed, and was executed along with his colleagues, resulting in the Kobals fleeing to what is now Austria. We learn this early, at the point at which Filip steps (as a very young man) across the border from Austria into Slovenia (this is in Iron Curtain days) in search of his brother who made the same crossing twenty-odd years earlier at a similar age. (Filip has two siblings a generation older than him) This parallel sets up that same paradigm of real and imagined. The brother left before WW2, served in that war, disappeared, and Filip can only recreate a relationship through the documentary traces his brother left behind. There are three of these documents – an apple orchard where the brother practiced his agricultural college skills located in a subsided little valley where an underground watercourse caused the land to collapsed and never visible when looking across the landscape. It remains hidden until you stand over it and in it. The other is the notebooks from agricultural college and the Slovenian/German dictionary his brother used to practice his new/old language, ticking off words as he went along. But Filip can only know his brother from the images that this documentary evidence conjures in him. He was a toddler when the brother left.

Why is this Slovenia/Austria divide so prominent, I kept asking myself. It is everywhere. When I first read the opening pages of Filip’s first step into this new land, I realised quickly that Handke has always written against the current of history. He was one of those rebellious authors Austria produced in the middle of the last century, Bernhard and Bachman are among the others, challenging power and authority through literature. Yet this novel is intimate, told like a memoir of a loving younger brother yearning and seeking. It is delicate in its layering of image on image, action on action with thoughts and feelings travelling on these images as the young man travels on both the land and in the mind. His most vivid sense, if it is one, is imagination. He interacts with landscapes to feel the faces and actions of the inhabitants of towns he passes, the texture and materials of buildings and the world of nature. He journeys through all these objects and observations attempting to know them, and to know something of his brother. It is a most striking book in that sense, sometimes I feel like I’m reading a 19thC novel by a Bronte, Hardy or G Eliot.

What is it about Slovenia? No matter how long the Kobals had lived in southern Austria, the distance between the locals and the Kobals is expressed through the father in the following way:

The household’s present, its daily life, was dominated by my father’s prisoner mentality. His being a stranger in the village made him a domestic tyrant.

Correspondingly, the father spoke German cleansed of local dialect:

passed onto everybody else in the family

It's a permanent punishment to keep purging corruptions in the German language, purifying it, then ensuring no future generation of his introduces corruptions. An exile (and an immigrant) is always looking to prove themselves. Multi-generational factors are always at play here. Even Filip's two siblings are so much older as to be a generation removed from him.

While the father could speak Slovene it could only erupt into being: As he regularly showed when talking to himself, often very loudly, in his workshop, he himself spoke it in his innermost consciousness, but he felt forbidden to let it out or pass it on to his children.

Handke painstakingly builds a picture of cultural alienation of a deep historical nature, of living a perpetual exile on the only land the (his) Kobals have ever occupied while carrying this cultural artefact of a home language around like a carapace, a home, a weight, a burden, a point of endless differentiation. One cannot settle in this land because it is forever a ‘foreign (Austrian) land’ and language. This picture perfectly explained my own sense of belonging nowhere. It takes a novel of this depth to explain an intangible, unknowable thing. I think Fernando Pessoa with all his examinations of unknowable states of being does something similar, though in more abstract imagery than Handke does. Bifurcated language and the intimate relationship to this divided self, incessantly haunts the mind.

Filip has two ages in the book. He is the young man barely 20 who crosses the border, and the middle-aged man twenty-five years later, examining his former self the way he examined the world of his lost brother. Their journeys parallel in time. One is real, the other unknowable and only recreated through a personal journey through the imagination.

Language, acquiring Slovenian, becomes part of the brother quest. Filip follows his brother’s use of the Slovenian/German dictionary as though following a path through mountains, villages, towns, landscapes. He accumulates words as an adult, studying their nuanced meaning in this new language, explaining like a pedagogue to his reader meanings he had no idea of and states he realises seem only possible in this new Slovenian. As though he can never truly know them. The individual character of language, its untranslatability from its source, is a fascinating journey in itself. Though it seems only academic since it is abstracted from the reality of growing up with it as a lived language. It’s like saying did you know they have this and that word in Slovenian for all sorts of weird and whacky matters. He knows he can only pursue language so far. He reaches a limit, which returns him to that state like his father of permanent exile. Neither in one place nor another.

I have marked this book in hundreds of places. It is only 246 pages long with large print and open line structure. I wish I had the time and place to write out dozens of quotes. It is such a worthwhile reading experience. Like no other. Expansive an unsettling at the same time. show less