Peter Handke: Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht

In my last book review, I complained about that “self-ironic” style where after every serious point the author has to crack a joke, and how much I hate that.
So now I am back to one of my proven authors, and in particular these wonder-full books. Peter Handke has been accused of many things, but being too self-ironic is not one of them.

— Finished Peter Handke’s Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht (which is available in English as My Year in the No-Man’s Bay, but I have not looked at that translation) last week, just in time to see Handke not get the Nobel Prize again this upcoming Friday. In my view he deserves it at least since the beaming, shining miniatures in Noch einmal für Thukydides, but of course he sort of disqualified himself with questionable political statements (although those were not as crazy as some journalists would think they are).

I read this book once before, in the summer of 2014, before going on a big travel – in particular I remember reading entire chapters in the waiting room of the vaccination clinic back then. In a way, the book was a good spiritual vaccination; I am quite sure I would have seen less on my travel if I had not read it.

This is unforgiving literature; you cannot let your mind wander for one instant. This is an author who, in each sentence, tries to express his own experience and his own thoughts in his own words. He is serious about being “present” and “aware” and “mindful” on a level that is incomprehensible to bloggers who would use those words to describe themselves and to pitch whatever they’re selling. Which is why it is a bit awkward when Handke, at rare moments, tries to be funny (e.g. after describing his noisy neighbours, the narrator learns that one of them is the celebrated author of a book called “Zen and the Art of Making Noise”). And I also understand smarter critics (like Karasek in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUkRi-EysoA&t=1033s) who say they just do not like Handke’s tone. True: We have learned to stand writers talking about themselves, and writers talking religiously, but a writer who somehow talks about himself religiously … yes, there is a tone that sometimes comes close to getting on my nerves too; but I remember I wrote the same thing about Thomas Mann’s tone not long ago, and that tone is almost the exact opposite of Handke’s.

Not all of it is great, not all of it is as great as he thinks it is; but he tries in earnest. He knows, better than his critics, that he cannot write “like the Russians of the 19th, or the Americans of the 20th century”, and that it would be cheating if he did (he would be really good at that). But he has moments of unheard-of beauty, insight and remembrance. One test of good art is that afterwards, you see more in the world around you. This book does that to me.

[And as for the Nobel Prize, I’m betting on Krasznahorkai again, whose Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming will come to me once it arrives at our library, soon.]

(originally published August 3 (first paragraph) / October 6, 2019; Handke actually received the Nobel Prize a few days later)