Hermann Lenz: Seltsamer Abschied / Strange Departure

Looking for good prose, hungry for the beauty of quiet sentences, I took Hermann Lenz's novel Seltsamer Abschied off my shelf. I last read it in Essen, Germany, in 1991.


I found the quiet sentences — more about them later — and I was also flooded with memories.


I was working on a book about standing as metaphor (I'm still working on that book) and had come to Essen in part because the Folkwang Museum had a sculpture by Nam June Paik that I wanted to write about, one that recreated a section of Stonehenge with televisions and electrical circuitry and video tape of the actual site. Here are a couple of photos of the piece.

I had come from Cologne, from stimulating conversations with Zarko about his work, and I had a lot to think about. Long hours of welcome solitude translated into experiences like this one:

23 May In the train — the sight of the halfmoon in a clear sky elicited a deep melancholy. I wanted only to be alone, to be immersed in the forms of nature, to be creatively engaged, to be undisturbed, sunk in contemplation. I wanted sadness and the pleasures of sadness. I wanted, consciously, absolutely nothing. In me was only the clear halfmoon through the train window that then disappeared at a curve in the tracks and yet was, surprisingly, still there, inside the train, a perfect mirroring, and then, only then, the moon disappeared.

There's still a ticket for public transportation in the book, good for 4 trips. Paid for in German Marks. 

The novel is about a writer named Eugen Rapp, a writer who is aging and whose life work has not been especially well received, a writer who is unsettled by uncertainty and yet secure in the quiet life he leads.

The first sentences, in my translation:

The painter, named Bretschneider, stood in the attic room with its new coat of white paint, looked around, and said: "There's a sign on the wall: Smoking Strictly Forbidden! Even if you can't see it."

Eugen nodded, and Herr Bretschneider looked at the corner where he had had to paint over the dark accretion of Eugen's pipe smoke three times.

 Eugen's wife is named Hanne (as is Lenz's) and this novel, in the third person, is a gently ironic self portrait. As the novel nears its end, Hanne hears that a young and very well known Austrian writer, Stephan Koval, has said in public that Eugen is one of his favorite authors. Ultimately, Koval arranges for his own publisher to take on Eugen's work. Egon visits him in Frankfurt Kronberg and is moved to see a basket "in which a colorful pair of child's pants lay next to a book, one that Eugen had written."

They sit together on a roof terrace and drink wine and listen to the quiet evening. They hear young voices and someone calls up to the terrace: "Are you Herr Koval?"

Stephan stood at the railing and looked down. — "Yes," he said — "Won't you come with us? We are going to climb over the swimming-pool fence and go skinny dipping." — "No, I don't want to do that," Stephan answered and was asked, from the darkness, what the message of his 'Kaspar' was. — "That life is hard."

In a protective tone of voice he answered, upright at the balcony railing; demanding respect. The way he had established distance without destroying the sense of connection, this was the memory that remained when he was back in Stuttgart.

There is more about a growing friendship, about Koval's young daughter, about the essay in the newspapers that bring readers to Eugen's books and changes his life, and finally about the departure from the attic room and the family home.

Peter Handke, of course, is the young Austrian author of the play Kaspar (translated into lively and provocative English by Michael Roloff) and Eugen is none other than Hermann Lenz.

Four years after I read Lenz's novel, I visited Peter Handke in Chaville, France, where he lives, and on December 21, 1995, he wrote to "Lieber Hermann, liebe Hanne . . . Inzwischen war hier ein Mormone und Deutsch-Professor aus Utah-USA, der Deine Bücher schön in sich hatte; er war in Germany sogar bei einer Lesung von Dir." (In the meantime a Mormon and German professor from Utah-USA was here, a man who had your books beautifully in himself; he even had attended a reading of yours in Germany. —from the volume of letters between the two authors called Berichterstatter des Tages).

This morning, once again, I have this book beautifully within me.

All the World's a Stage: Prelude to a Discussion

Tomorrow the discussion of Peter Handke's "Immer noch Sturm" (Still Storm), for which Michael Roloff has set a lavish and thoughtful stage

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html

will begin.

The blog address, beyond that first post, is

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/

It promises to be an innovative form of literary analysis, a back-and-forth dialogue that may produce sparks. That the play is working in me as I prepare for the discussion is evident in the captions below:

Lyn's dill drying reminds me of the apples and goats' milk in Still Storm

young buck on stage but thinking he won't be seen when he browses on the penstemons

the curtain falls, gloriously

Peter Handke's "Immer noch Sturm"

This morning I finished reading Peter Handke's "Immer noch Sturm" (Still Storm), a play that premiered last night in Salzburg.

Three young bucks browsed through the yard as I read, feeling like players in the play that left me shaking my head:

What is this about? I can scarcely think the words I read in the same context as this photo from the performance. Long paragraphs and long sentences that never evoked this scene in my unimaginative brain.

How could what I read possibly be played on stage? I'm too much a reader of prose and too little of plays.

I need to reread and think this through. And that's exactly what I'm planning, with Handke translator Michael Roloff. The discussion will take place here:

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-storm.html

Wish us luck. Join in the discussion.

Summary of Reviews of Handke's "The Great Fall" by M. Roloff

This revista of reviews of Peter's "Der Grosse Fall," compiled by Michael Roloff, is also posted at 

http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html

along with links to much, much more material related to the work and life of Peter Handke.

Recent portrait of Michael, done in Seattle by J. Patterson

..................................................................

I did not read the reviews prior to my reading, a very slow,
chapter by chapter, and commenting on it at; not that reading them would have changed anything in my reception http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/; nor did Scott; and our discussing certain aspects, especially its religious and aesthetic components, at leisure. Now I have read all the reviews to which I have access, a dozen or more, and will reread the book in one slow fell swoop. While Scott and I prepare ourselves for an online discussion of IMMER NOCH STURM, as of its Salzburg premiere on the 12 of this August, at:

  http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

Right now I can say about these reviews  that in general: in the instance of Andreas Breitenbach at the NZZ, Georg Schmidt in DIE ZEIT and especially the reviewer in The Stuttgarter, who really engaged with the book, that they opened up aspects of which I had not paid attention. Several reviews were gravely disappointing, Klaus Kastberger's and Lothar Struck's because both gentlemen know Handke's work. Schmidt strikes me as best attuned to Handke. However, what is really needed about Handke as phenomenon is an essay, say on the order of Walter Benjamin's about Karl Kraus, or one of the great Adorno essays in NOTEN ZUR LITERATUR {notes on literature, columbia u. press, shierry nicholson weber, translator}. I have all that interiorized somehow plus of course the great things in English and American, so perhaps I will try to fail there one of these days. What I miss most immediately in all the reviews is the failure to note that "Amok running" was already a theme in NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and recourse to Handke's frequent violence and seeking of peace, to draw the parallel between the 1987 THE AFTERNOON OF THE WRITER and DER GROSSE FALL; or noting that Paris played an important role during Handke's first Paris period [1972-79 - is this still the "Keuschnig": of those days?,or noting how much of a FREUDENSTOFF, to use Peter Strasser's once succinctness about a lot of Handke's subsequent work, DER GROSSE FALL what a joy in life it conveys despite the irritants that upset our absolute genius hyper-super-duper nervous system. No doubt some great graduate student is already at work breaking this piece of art down into its components.

1] The review in Neues Deutschland, as so often the case there with Handke, is definitely worth reading, and entices the reader to read,the book: http://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/199737.das-augenaufgehen-einer-geschichte.html

I see nothing objectionable in it. The reviewer has a sense of the poetic. I expect that if he had more space he might have had more to say and address the book's form, and some of its details. If we get  anything like it in the U.S. of Sheeples we will be lucky!

2] Andreas Breitenstein in the NZZ [Neue Zuricher Zeitung] who,writes comparatively, to the ND with a heavy pen is however, right on:
 "Wer Handke kennt weiss, dass ein Viel an Handlung nicht zu erwarten ist", seeming not to realize that each sentence, in Handke's case, is the action. Andreas apparently had  a bit of a hard time, so did a few other plaintiffs, something I cannot say for myself. However, Breitenbachs description is reliale, and he also gets that GROSSER FALL becomes like HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER. Again: anything as first rate is not to be excpected here in the U.S.S.R.

3]The well-known Austrian reviewer Daniela Strigl in the FAZ also, confesses to some difficulty in her ability to follow - somethign that I feel is due to here not reading each sentence as slowly for it to yield the so much that is there. She instead makes the mistake of recounting the actor's walk without in fact recounting it as the series of epiphanies, which is all that counts. That is, she simplifies these steps into bad cliches which give the reader of the review not the faintest. However, she is not insensitive in some of her generalizations:

"In all ihrer Weltwut und Zärtlichkeit ist die Erzählung ebenso gegenwärtig wie märchenhaft surreal, eine apokalyptische Zauberposse mit selbstironischer und satirischer Spitze."

 Strigl ends with a kind of last paragraph cop-out that would do honor to the NY Times Book Review:

 "So schön und verblüffend die Umspringbilder und short cuts en detail wirken (auch Handkes Sätze sind häufig kurz angebunden), so hat das atemlos additive Verfahren des Aventuiren-Berichts doch seine Tücken. Der unaufhörliche Kulissenzauber strapaziert die Geduld des Lesers, der im Distanzlauf leicht auf der Strecke bleibt. Aber wie lautet das Motto des Amokläufer-Buches, das der Schauspieler liest: „Die Ungeduld vernichtet die Existenz.“ At any event, the FAZ has kept Hubert Spiegel in its dog house.

4] derives from the Stuttgarter Zeitung,  there is nothing
wrong with it except it too, cannot put it's finger, get a real grasp of the book yet comes through at the end:

" Zwischen Epischem und Dramatischem gibt es bei Peter Handke keinen Unterschied'
 
 Die Mischung aus Krimielementen und solchen aus dem antiken Gesang, aus Entwicklungsroman und Gesellschaftsporträt wird gegen Ende immer explosiver. 

  Der letzte Satz des Buches - "Stattdessen der Große Fall" - ist elliptisch. Ihm fehlt das Zeitwort, also die gesamte Bewegung der Sprache. Der Auslöser für diesen Absturz ist offenkundig die Beziehung zu jener namenlosen Frau; die Begegnung kann nicht mehr stattfinden. Doch das ist nur ein Aspekt dieses Gangs von oben hinab in die Unterwelt der Stadt, dieser Erkundung des Inneren.

Es ist die alte Paradoxie der Literatur, dass die Erfahrung solch eines Absturzes der Sprache das Schreiben erst möglich macht. Der erste Satz des Buches, der den "Großen Fall" bereits voraussetzt, bereitet im selben Atemzug den letzten Satz vor, in dem der "Große Fall" den Leser förmlich überrumpelt. Die Sprache setzt sich frei- sie wäre sonst ein bloßes Kommunikationsmittel. Handke verdichtet in diesem Buch viele Motive seiner früheren Bücher bis hin zum Manierismus: Er wiederholt und variiert seinen spezifischen Formelvorrat. Er hält dem landläufigen Sprechen einen verstörend hohen Ton entgegen, der an etwas ganz anderes erinnert.
5] I have lost the source for this - no matter, it is a neither fish nor fowl reviewer, who adds nothing. it's only use is that it might alert someone interested in Handke to the existence of the book.

6] Is by the knowledgeable Handke expert Klaus Kastberger who is writing in the Austrian paper DIE PRESSE and emphasizes Handke's Christ complex, without noting that Handke takes a carnal Liberation Theology tack here once the two workers have broken bread. I would like to point out here that Handke since his earliest days has functioned as a "surrogate" in the culture, in Freud's sense of the word. The early plays - the SPRECH STUECKE, all of which I translated, manifest that quality: the conscience of the race, even more than that: DER HAUSIERER as a work that overcomes fear, anxiety is also composed in an objective manner. If anyone is interested in my demonstration how Handke in the poem SINGULAR AND PLURAL [Die Einzahl und die Mehrzahl] can be seen in the act of composition of allaying his own anxiety: the opposite of the hoary conversion hysteria, in the event anyone has interest in reason to be puzzled by the various sources of Handke's immense industriousness during the past near fifty years. 

 http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
also at: http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html

Kastberger is not especially sensitive to what the formal aspects of the book, the dimensions in which it plays. He approaches it autobiographically, but doesn't carry through. Mention that Handke appears to call the stuff with which you glue tiles by the first name of his biographer Malte Herwig, sticky stuff I recall not that I think of how hard it was to get off me. Herwig's bio is fine on Handke's childhood, but the author has no interest in the work, and no relationship to it; he was a good gum shoe and not only in the archive, and also did some useful interviewing. Handke, as far as I am concerned, as a person, strikes me as even more unpleasant. The  has a very long review of mine of MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG and also has Marie Colbin's review which Herwig and his publisher DTV  successfully eliminated from the Nachrichten.at by threatening suit for 60 K. Amazing! The volume FREIHEIT DER SCHRIFT that Kasteberger editor for Zsolnay is marvelous collection of Handkeana, however, his own pieces there,too, show him to be some kind of cultural apparachik, and he does not far well be comparison with many of the brilliant contributions by Fabjan Haffner, Elizabeth Schwagerle, Hans Hoeller, et. al.

7] derives from Evelyne Polt-Heinzla and is fine and unobjectionable."Dass Handkes Bücher immer auch Kommentare zur mentalen und gesellschaftlichen Befindlichkeit sind, ist von der Kritik genauso häufig übersehen worden wie des Autors Talent zu Groteske und (Selbst-)Ironie.

Der Tag ist eine einzige Bewegung auf sie zu; unmittelbar vor der Begegnung bleibt der Erzählfaden wie in einer ins Unendliche gedehnten Zeitlupeneinstellung hängen – ein stummer Verzweiflungsschrei über das Scheitern der Liebe "...

Was der Stadtstreicher auf seinem Weg sieht und wie Handke diese Fundstücke arrangiert, ergibt eine dichte Folge von Momentaufnahmen über die großen und kleinen sozialen Katastrophen unserer Gegenwart. Die Blickrichtung ist auf den Boden konzentriert; wie beim Geologen Sorger in "Langsame Heimkehr" wird der "gesenkte Kopf" berufsbedingt erklärt, denn ursprünglich war der Schauspieler Fliesenleger. Wenn er im Stadtwald die Spuren "der aushäusig Gewordenen und endgültig Abgehausten" sieht, dann wird wie im Negativ die jüngste Ausweisungspolitik Frankreichs sichtbar.

8] Lothar Struck, writing under his own name not that of Keuschnig, the deferential pseudonym he has adopted for his Begleitschreiben blog http://www.begleitschreiben.net/ ,
first does a kind of resume of other works along the same line as his review of MORAVIAN NIGHT:

" Zunächst einmal sind Handkes Figuren Forschungsreisende in eigener Sache; einsame Sucher nach einem Platz in der trost-losen Welt, nach einem Aufgehoben-Sein." ...Und das neue Buch, »Der Große Fall«? "Es war eine Endzeit. Aber man hatte sich an diese gewöhnt. Sie würde nie enden." ...When Struck describes the fight of neighbor against neighbor he entirely misses that this scene occurs entirely in the actor's film fantasy mind who projects an intuition into visual form in an entirely farcical manner, I imagine so farcical so as not to be misunderstood by the likes of Struck. Lothar thinks of this as one of Handke's succession of fairy tales, and forgets that NOMANSBAY was called "A Fairy Tale of Time" - which added nothing as far as I was concerned. However, the book about going mushrooming for his daughter Laocadie LUCIE IM DEN WALD MIT DEN DINGSBUMS is definitely a successful very artificial fairy tale. Would make a great children's y.a. in this country. ABSENCE I experienced as reading a film - the kineaesthetic quality of Handke's prose, certain sections here are severely fractured, perhaps the above use of the word "maniriert" is appropriate? So far I have no read any mention of its Shakespearean dimenstion, The Tempestand Midsummer Night's Dream qualities that the GROSSE FALL has.

# 9] joerg magenau [?[ in the TAGESANZEIGER is the only really negative voice who evidently has been sick of Handke for some time. He'd like to have had some kind of Schnulzer to review it seems.

10] Versuch über den Müßiggang again I find entirely unobjectionable.

11]"dass man womöglich selbst beginnt, die eigenen Wege in der Großstadt in nahezu handkescher Sprache aich selbst zu erzählen, kann ich aus eigener Erfahrung als eine Nebenwirkung dieser Erzählung festhalten. Eine Nebenwirkung, die ich nicht als schädlich ansehewrites Herr Labig in his blog, and I could not agree more: http://herrlarbig.de/2011/06/27/herrn-larbigs-bibliothek-8-peter-handke-der-grose-fall

12] Schriftstellerin Wiesmüller "Anklingen des Religiösen" in Handkes "Der große Fall"  Scott has dealt with. I have nothing to add to our discussion of the Christian aspect of the book. Scott has already addressed this self-serving approach in an earlier posting.

13] The Review in the Sueddeutsche is a once over lightly that is completely acceptable and smooth, and neither adds nor detracts anyting to or form my reading of the book.14]Von Hage, Volker DER SPIEGEL 
Handke hat den Vergleich selbst herausgefordert. Vor einem Vierteljahr wetterte er in einem Interview gegen das "rezepthafte Schreiben" amerikanischer Erzähler. Jonathan Franzen folge einem Strickmuster, und auch Philip Roth sei "letzten Endes nur ein Conférencier". In der Literatur, so Handke, müsse "sprachlich die Suchbewegung drin sein", es müsse "Ausbrüche geben, ein beherrschtes Sichgehenlassen".


15] Der Falter Klaus Nuechtern writes::
Wenn einem ständig erzählt wird, wie zu gehen und zu sehen, wie zu sammeln und zu hungern sei (ja, auch der Hunger kann bei Handke „falsch“ oder „richtig“ sein), dann droht der Kollaps durch ethische Dauerüberhitzung. In dieser – und wirklich nur in dieser! – Hinsicht fühlt man sich bei der Lektüre ein bisschen wie in einem Film von Woody Allen: „Gestern hatte ich einen Orgasmus, aber mein Arzt meinte, es sei nicht der richtige.“

Ausgerenkt an Leib und Seele":

 

Je näher der schweifende Rhapsode des selig Nutzlosen und durch seine Profanität Geheiligten der Stadt kommt, desto mehr sieht er sich mit den apokalyptischen Ausläufern einer "Endzeit" konfrontiert, die allein von Feindseligkeit, Gewalt und Entfremdung beherrscht wird, einer Realität, die abwechselnd das Gewaltpotential und das Helfersyndrom in ihm wachruft. Von ihrem Fluch, so muss er einsehen, kann er die sündige Stadt nicht erlösen. Doch der geschärfte Blick, in den dieser zivilisationsmüde, ausgewilderte Asphaltindianer die entzauberte Welt nimmt - er hat durchaus etwas von einem Amoklauf, allerdings nicht der blindwütigen Gewalt, sondern der hellsichtigen Poesie

Wenn einem ständig erzählt wird, wie zu gehen und zu sehen, wie zu sammeln und zu hungern sei (ja, auch der Hunger kann bei Handke „falsch“ oder „richtig“ sein), dann droht der Kollaps durch ethische Dauerüberhitzung. In dieser – und wirklich nur in dieser! – Hinsicht fühlt man sich bei der Lektüre ein bisschen wie in einem Film von Woody Allen: „Gestern hatte ich einen Orgasmus, aber mein Arzt meinte, es sei nicht der richtige.“

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 10

The fifth chapter begins with a nice play on the book's title, the double meaning Michael Roloff and I have discussed as he translates the title as "The Major Case" and I as "The Great Fall."

The actor is, for a second, "the other," the man he has just left still screaming "shut up!" Like him (and he has, the narrator writes, become the other, is not just acting like the other), the actor feels his ordered life disintegrating, starting with his shoelaces that come undone and trip him so he falls to the ground "to never stand up again." Then comes the urge to to throw off his clothing and to throw away his keys and to sit on a hydrant stinking while passersby give him a wide berth.

Luckily for him ("luckily for him -- 'why luckily for me?'") the moment of being the other passes, "is past, 'in this case at least.'"

Along with the play on falling and case, again the presence, the strong presence of both narrator and actor. In his comment on part 9, Michael Roloff adds an interesting twist to that notion:


no end of detail that make me believe that handke is having his fun with a lot of personal routines: the mere dab of shoe polish, putting the shoes in the fridge so that they will be fresh...  the way these details are described, too, have that quality of discociation, self-conciousness about them. however, by transferring to a/ the woman's place some contradictions and odd emphases slip in: a few times too often for my taste he mentions that he found an object as though sleepwalking - if he has been with the woman umpteenth # of times? he ought to know where, say the vaccum cleaner is in the meanwhile. etc.


If this is a realistic novel, then there are many details that make a reader think "this is not believable." We're left to think a) this is sloppy writing or b) something else is going on.

Playfulness, as Michael points out, is one of the things that is going on. Narrative playfulness in which the author and the narrator and the actor and the man in the woods the actor sees and the character in the book the actor is reading and the character in the film the actor is to play in all blend together as the same character and then are ripped apart by breaks or discontinuities in the text, only to blend together again (as when, on page 124, the actor, who has reached into his pocket for his keys, remembers the character in the book he was reading earlier who "while reaching into his pocket, for nothing really, his hand remained in his pocket and when the reader closed the book a few pages later the hand in question was still in the pocket in question."

Michael used the word "unterschwellig" earlier in response to some of these breaks. The book is constantly subverting itself as real or natural, asserting itself as book. Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

And now the actor leaves the woods and stands in a place where he overlooks the city of cities, a city that is, the narrator writes, "ein Daliegen," a lying there. From the actor's "Standort," standing place, the city pulses and he finds a hearty pleasure in the sight in this standing moment/nunc stans: "und was gab es Herzhafteres als das Jetzt."

The sight heartens him so thoroughly that he works against the ravages of entropy that have come during his walk through the woods: he ties his shoe, tightens his tie, cleans his shoes, and tucks in his shirt. The act of tucking in his shirt reminds him of a film scene in which a man about to be executed stops to tuck in his shirt and then is killed. After wondering why that image came to him right then, he pulls his shirt back out: it would have come untucked anyway while he walked.

Order/disorder. Standing/falling. The created Now as the threshold between?

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 8

 Rain yesterday afternoon and evening, squalls riffing across the valley as the drummer boomed and brushed and crackled an electric free jazz accompaniment.

I've been reading Peter's book in the mornings, when I'm best able too concentrate. In the afternoons and evenings I've been reading a translation of Jo Nesbo's Norwegian mystery/detective/crime fiction novel (who the hell keeps changing the generic designation?) "The Redeemer."

The contrasts between the books are, perhaps, illustrated by these two photos I took yesterday from the deck, the first looking east, the second looking south.

Clouds, bunched and sculpted clouds; or clouds and mountains and fields and trees and houses and blue sky. A novel about perception and the language that shapes it; or a novel about a contract killer shaped in the war between Serbs and Croats who kills his target in Oslo while alcoholic and brilliant inspector Harry Hole scrambles to find the killer while getting laid a couple of times while mourning the girlfriend who has left him for a doctor.

Over 5 million sold, Nesbo's book claims. Peter too has a lot of books in a lot of editions and they surely add up to millions as well. But I remember standing next to a rough table in the yard of Peter's home in Chaville while he showed me a letter from Roger Straus, his American publisher, to Siegfried Unseld, his German publisher: "Dear Siegfried, we have a problem. Our problem is Peter Handke." Straus' problem, I took it, was that Peter's characters don't fly to Zagreb to get drunk at the bar of the Hotel International while looking for whoever runs the contract killer after hearing by phone that his fellow officer has just been stabbed by the killer, called "The Little Redeemer," in Oslo.

Instead, in chapter three, the actor enters a clearing in the woods near an unidentified city, looks around, sense the stillness, feels irritation at the ugly people who then enter the clearing without looking around, then, in a major turnaround, feels a sweet unity with those same people who greet him -- even, especially! the mountainbike riders greet him: "That was a storm this morning, wasn't it!"But that's not all. There's a long encounter with a man picking blackberries. The picking, the man explains, is an art form, and the reader experiences this in a long sentence reported in indirect discourse: "The large berries are supposedly, by the way, not necessarily the ripest, often still green underneath, and would remain green, without ripening, and he discovered that the sweetest berries are not to be found, for instance, in the direct sun that burns down all day in the clearcuts but rather hidden under the leaves, always in the shade there: ah, what a disintegration in the mouth, a single shaddowberry like that, a Seim (sic) back into the gums and from there farther up to just under the top of the skull." [I'm not sure what the mistake was, the word that the picker mis-spoke; and I've never seen any of Peter's narrators do something like this (sic).]

I have more patience for the description this morning, can taste the big blackberry.

And when I reread the paragraph that follows the claim that picking berries is and art form and the next one in which the berry picker explains that while he picks he recites numbers, stock quotes, and claims that picking berries sharpens his sense for numbers, a sense that has never betrayed him, I find myself in an action-packed description that rivals anything in Jo Nesbo's work: "The berry picker would never again emerge from the thorny bushes." When he knocks against a wasp nest the wasps sting him, or will sting him in the narrator's fantasy, hundreds of times on the lips, the tongue, the throat and break off the litany of numbers. He fall, will fall, to the ground where the thorns will grow over him and a whole colony of ants will turn him into winter stores.

Now we're talking!

..............
A couple of notes in response to Michael Roloff's comments on part 7:

The contrast Michael notes between Handke's/the actor's happiness that the woman has left him quietly the morning after and Henry Green's wish to share toast the next morning with "cunty fingers" raises the thorny issue of narrator and author, an issue especially acute in Handke's work. Obviously, at least obviously to Michael and to me, the actor stands in, as he thinks and experiences, for Peter Handke. The walk through the woods as the curriculum for a whole plot is straight out of Peter's life, as are the desire for stillness and love of beauty and hatred of people who have become types and, as Michael says, the need for distance from the beautiful women he is with. Michael foregrounds the autopsychobiographical aspects (he's a trained analyst, after all).

The thoughts in the other comment about the actor's acting as if he's chewing bread ("Der Schauspieler gab sich den Anschein, als gehoere das Kauen des Brots, als gehoere auch jeder Schluck zur Vorbereitung auf das, was bevorstand. . . .") just before he opens the door to find "a man in the form of a rainman" who is the woman's husband and who berates him -- Michael, isn't this a figure he has summoned out of the lonely morning? Isn't this, like the ceremony he creates by acting the cutting and chewing, his own creation? Isn't this like the killing of the berry picker?

After this he simply eats his breakfast (as opposed to acting breakfast). And then he thinks about himself and the woman. The woman, and I think it's important that the woman's speech about love is in quotation marks, is the one who raises their (her) love to a revenge on and an overcoming of time. She sees this as the standing moment, the nunc stans, the apotheosis of meaning. In her mind they "have become and have been what is the case."

This "case," is, of course, good support for your translation of the title: The Major Case.

And finally, remind me of the Austrian emigre? I'm drawing a blank.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 5

I just realized that one of the reasons I had let this book languish on my shelf so long before finally beginning to read it was that its cover is ugly. See the image on the first post about the novel.

This morning I took the cover off to reveal an elegant book, bright-dark green. The scan, complete with morning sunlight that has leaked in a couple of places, shows a much finer book.

The actor's morning, so far a contest between chaos and form, continues as he glues together the cup that had fallen from his hand. And outside the wind stands up a chair that had fallen: ". . . a fallen chair was lifted up again by the wind and stood then, and stood. Was that then a thing of possibility? Yes."

Entropy will win this ongoing battle, as it always does. It is, after all, the law, the second law of thermodynamics to be specific. And the novel is called the Great Fall, not the Great Standing.

The rain continues and the actor reads a book, a book about a kind of running amok, an act related to the role he will play in the film. He reads and disappears into the narration. The motto of the story: "Impatience destroys existence." The narrator of Handke's book summarizes a couple of the chapters that sound close to the the book I am reading: "The following chapter began as the man stepped out of the house onto the street." And, as I expect, the second chapter of Handke's book begins as the actor leaves the house. 44 pages to wake up and have breakfast and leave the house.

Slow going. Slow going that feels welcome this slow hot Sunday morning. Patience solidifies existence.

................ postscript
thoughts from Michael Roloff and my subsequent thoughts:

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:29 AM, michael roloff  wrote:

 No one so far among the reviewers or here seems to be fazed that
our actor seems to have a bit of a brain aneurysm after the thunderstorm and taking his morning shower while swishing around the grass in the rain! he's off balance and only gradually finds it again. also there are some oddities: he mentions that the swallows "before" seemed to fly higher, too  - what "before" I feel like saying: wasn't he asleep and then fell asleep again. There are matters happening "unterschwellig"/ surreptitiously under the surface as you read the text - of which you become aware if you read carefully, but "bevor" ??
also, the text is not as carefully proofread as usual: the verb shultern
is suddenly upper case. 

Michael,

you're pointing to a key moment. I've gone back and reread it. What exactly causes him to be so clumsy? He is listening to the radio and think the rain has quit, but then realized it hasn't quit. Is that a momentary break, the brain aneurysm you're thinking about? "Als er seiner inne wurde" follows immediately and then he can't grab what he wants to grab. And why does he gradually come out of this?

The sentence that ends with Shultern made, there at the end, no sense to me. Your suggestion that shultern is a verb makes it come clear. Simple typo.

As for the "before" in the swallow passage: this is, as you write, a break in the description of what the actor is experiencing at the moment. I take it to be a break in the pure (and beautiful) phenomenology, a break caused by the knowledge encapsulated in the accepted "fact" that swallows dive down in the face of storms. Like hell they do, the actor thinks. Having stripped off that bit of "knowledge," he can simply be a body in the rain and grass.

And once I think it this way, following your thought, I can make sense of what was a jarring sentence at the end of the paragraph in the rain: Er wuerde im Haus keine Dusche zu nehmen brauchen. He's back in language, back in the scheme that requires cleanliness for the day, back to the "Dusche nehmen" -- what an ugly phrase. Especially when backed up against the previous one: Der Regen war warm, und nach einigen Schritten kalt, dann wieder warm, undsofort."

Marks, Signatures, Authors, Books

Michael Roloff sent an email today with a link to this blog posting about the marks inside an English translation of an early novel by Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell. "I bought this book for 50p," the blog author writes, and goes on to follow the information written inside the book. He speculates on the name Charles Unwin and travels through London to photograph the building at the address given.

I admired the idea, the quiet nature of the thought, the bookishness of the whole thing.

And I turned to a book of my own, bought for $7.50 in Powell's Bookstore in Portland over a decade ago. It's the first edition of a book Michael eventually translated whose English title became the title of this blog.

Inside the stylish mattblack cover is a single letter followed by a period: P.

I have always supposed this is Peter's elegant and minimal signature.

I had met and translated and travelled with Peter before acquiring this book. I never asked him for his signature in any of the books of his I own. I have them because of what they say, because of the sentences and characters and ideas they make manifest, and not because he inscribed them. Having said that, this little book still feels special to me, takes me back to a moment, perhaps, when someone handed a young author a copy of the book and he made his mark.

Peter Handke's Best Book?

Welches empfinden Sie als das beste Buch von Handke? Okay, blöde Frage. Die besten drei!

Which book do you think is Handke's best? Okay, stupid question. The best three!

This challenge is from the Peter Handke translator and psychoanalyst Michael Roloff, sent to several of us who like to converse about the work of the Austrian author whose novel title (in Roloff's translation) is the title of my blog.

Michael suggested we think about the best book of the various periods and genres.

    

The German literary critic and blogger Lothar Struck wrote that he thinks the recent Moravian Night is one of the best books, if not the best book. "Almost any other writer would receive the Nobel Prize for that book alone."  

Michael responded to that assessment: "Wonderful, of course, I shall read it at least three times before writing on it. The bastard has become better and better and deeper and deeper." 

I've hesitated to join the conversation, and only this morning realized why. I've got a complicated and sometimes troubled and always thankful and deeply personal and often quirky relationship with these books. I don't know if I can do this. But I'd like to find a way.

So my divisions and choices and equivocations are as follows:

1. The group that Suhrkamp Verlag published in paperback. I love to see the colors and uniform size on my shelf: See a photo of some of them above. I've arranged my books in various ways over the years, but keep coming back to color and size and publisher as a reasonable and aesthetic way to make words and things correspond. My favorite of this rainbow of books may be The Goalie's Anxiety. When Joseph Bloch finds that his map doesn't exactly correspond to the landscape, he and I breath deep sighs of relief. The authorities may not be able to find us after all.

2. The essays and play about the former Yugoslavia have shaped me and my thinking, have measured and cut and sanded my thoughts after providing possible blueprints. They affect me so much, in part, because I worked (am working) hard to translate them, and translation is, perhaps, the most intensive kind of reading. Because people comment on these Yugoslavia books, especially, without having read them, they have been controversial. Language is critical as we move toward or away from war. That's Peter's point. Journalists and politicians and commentators don't like to be reminded that they are sloppy with language. So they attack the messenger. And finally, these books remind me of the trip my friend Zarko and I took with Peter along the Drina River. It was one of the defining weeks of my life. 

3. The big novels, written after criticism that Peter couldn't write big novels. Peter showed me a letter from Robert Straus, the American publisher, to Siegfried Unseld, Peter's German publisher, that opened with the sentence: "We've got a big problem. His name is Peter Handke." Straus' problem, of course, was that Peter had started to write a new kind of novel. And it wasn't selling. Selling lots of copies isn't one of my criteria, however, and each of these novels has given me hours of sanity and careful form and slow perception in a precipitous and unperceptive world. For my favorite of these, see my final entry.

4. Translations. Peter has made a lot of literature accessible to German readers through his translations from Greek, French, English, and Slovenian. Although I can read the English, I love his translation of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. I told Peter that I laughed when I came to the scene where Autolycus was selling ballads and found that one of them was Dylan's "Stuck in Mobile singing the Memphis blues." Yes, he said, I allowed myself that. Peter's little German/Croatian dictionary (he had added "Serbian" to the title so it accurately reflected the dual nature of the language) was well worn. I'd love to see the shelf of his dictionaries. Perhaps they would be my favorites of all his works.

5. Although I can't read them, Zarko Radakovic's translations of Peter's work have to fit in here somewhere. I first heard of Peter Handke in conversation with Zarko in Tuebingen, Germany. Zarko is an active and even bold translator. He sees his work with Peter's works as part of his larger creative project, which includes performance art, jazz criticism, novels, creative biography (Julija Knifer), and thematic editing. For instance, at the back of his translation of Peter's Kindergeschichte, Zarko presents a separate section featuring texts and works of art about childhood by the likes of Michael Hamburger, Braco Dimitrijevic, Ilma Rakusa, Tomaz Salamun, David Albahari, Martin Kippenberger, and yours truly. From Peter Handke's German to Serbo-Croatian. From Peter Handke's childhood to our own experiences. A fine textual textile.

6. This interweaving of texts makes it productively difficult to decide where to quit expanding the discussion of which of Peter's books have influenced me the most. Zarko's and my books: the first following a character from Peter's Repetition into Slovenia, and the second an account of our trip with Peter up the Drina River in the former Yugoslavia, would never have been written if we hadn't been reading Peter Handke.

7. Peter has written a lot of notes in the notebooks he carries everywhere with him, words and drawings to help him remember what he has seen. He also has reviewed the work of other writers, teaching me in the process that while it makes good sense to write about how a work works on the reviewer, its never even interesting to pronounce judgments on works of art.

8. And there are Peter's plays and poetry. Although it's not in this photo, but rather in the rainbow one, I'll choose the early Kaspar as especially important for me, a riff on Herder's claim that we don't speak language but that it speaks us. Kaspar, by the way, was wonderfully translated by Michael. The much later play, Voyage by Dugout, whose premiere I saw in Vienna, left me, as I stumbled out of the theater, with a fierce resolve to return often to Peter's work as a powerful antidote to what ails me (and the worlds I live in).

9. Peter wrote a children's book, which I include here as an excuse to reproduce my friend Thomas Deichmann's photo of Peter and his daughter Leocadie.

10. And finally, because I don't know which of Peter's works is the best, because I can't know, because I'm not smart enough to figure that out, I have to say that the book I like the best is the one I've worked hardest on, the one I've spent the most time with, the one that bears my marks, the one that I've written about critically ("Postmetaphysical Metaphysics") and personally (Zarko's and my Repetitions) -- Peter's novel Die Wiederholung / Repetition.