Peter Handke’s Tale of the Telling of the Tale

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/books/review/peter-handke-fruit-thief.html

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THE FRUIT THIEFOr, One-Way Journey Into the InteriorBy Peter HandkeTranslated by Krishna Winston

Having been commissioned to review the new novel by the Austrian writer and 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke, I came to the task, I admit, with a certain reluctance. He’s a curious case, Handke. Of all the readers I know, I’ve heard few express genuine passion for his work (the exception is a playwright who, like the young Handke of the 1960s, works in the austerities of German experimental theater). Of the Handke books I’d read — a mixed bag of nonfiction and novels that trend toward postmodernist self-reflexivity — most have elicited my intrigue, but none have I found easy to love. With its nouveau roman asceticism, Handke’s writing typically leaves me with a sense of being kept on the outside of something that is cold, severe and not obviously enjoyable.

A dozen pages into reading “The Fruit Thief: Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior,” which was first published in German in 2017 and now appears in a translation by Krishna Winston, I had the not unexciting realization that, if nothing else, for the next 300 pages I was in for an experience of unadulterated literature: that is, a work that would pay not the slightest heed to genre conventions, commercial imperatives or even — this I was less enthusiastic about — the reader’s timid expectation that he might be shown a good time. I was also reminded that I was dealing here with a very slippery fish.

The story begins with the sentence “The story began on one of those midsummer days when you take off your shoes to walk barefoot in the grass and get stung by a bee for the first time in the year.” The first three words announce in a classical, almost fairy-tale-like way that a narrative of sorts has indeed commenced, while simultaneously erecting a frame of self-awareness that puts us at a slight remove from it — a hint, perhaps, that what follows will encompass a deconstruction of stories themselves, their telling and their tellers. In this regard, Handke has a history: His short novel from 1987, “The Afternoon of a Writer,” restricts its narrative horizons to the writer’s doubts and ruminations as he psychs himself up to work.

The opening phrase of “The Fruit Thief” is no red herring: Mentions of “the story” and “this story” recur throughout the book. Making explicit his role as imaginer of the tale he is unfurling, the writer continually reminds us that we are encountering not the thing in itself, but rather the telling of the thing, “as I try to narrate this story not ex post facto but before the fact, for those to whom it matters.” He admits to hazing the details: “In reality it was not a highway, nor was the lane lined with cypresses. But I decided to have it so, in this story.” At the same time, the story is “more or less ‘true.’” (Those mischievous scare quotes!) Later, he makes things even more complicated by identifying as the reader, positioning himself slightly to one side of the narrator: “Stories that narrate themselves: I, the reader, have no use for them.” Perhaps in jest, he describes “the story experienced through the fruit thief” as “a story of our times, if ever there was one.”

By this point in the review, the reader is perfectly justified in demanding an answer to a key question: What’s the story? Well, it’s a story of two halves, or rather two distinct phases of unequal length. (There are no chapter breaks, although unlike his more misanthropic compatriot Thomas Bernhard, Handke at least lets us pause for breath between paragraphs.) As the novel begins, a writer who, like Handke, lives in a village outside Paris sets out one August afternoon across the capital and into the Picardy region. Observing his environs as he goes, he sporadically refers to a young woman he calls “the fruit thief” who also seems to have gone on a similar journey into the country’s northern provinces. This “fruit thief” — we later learn her name is Alexia — seems at first to be his mental image of the protagonist in a novel he intends to write, or rather, is writing. It becomes apparent that in tracing her steps, real or imagined, across inland France, he is writing his way into her and thus conjuring the novel into being. In short, Handke doesn’t just give us the story, but also, as was the vogue in the days of Milan Kundera and literary postmodernism, the imagining of the story and the conditions from which it emerged.

The France that the narrator travels through is recognizably one of the recent past, still in shock after the jihadist atrocities — a nation at war, yet “silent and paralyzed with terror.” As his train exits Paris, a noise startles the narrator and his fellow passengers: “Fear was in all our bones. … If nothing else, we contemporaries had something in common now.”

I’d have gotten on better with this book if Handke had continued with his first-person peregrination, doing away with the fictive conceit in favor of something akin to his 1996 Serbian travelogue, “A Journey to the Rivers” (the kind of book that, in his Nobel Prize speech, Handke called “my narrative excursions or one-man expeditions”). However, a unidirectional shift occurs some 75 pages in: Suddenly the wanderer is no longer thinking intermittently of Alexia, but has removed himself from the stage in order to tell her story. The phantom limb pain of expecting that we will revert to the “I” perspective fades into an acceptance that we’re stuck with Alexia for the remainder. The young woman is roaming through Picardy in search of her mother, having recently returned from an impromptu voyage to Siberia. While there is no shortage of descriptive color and incident, albeit of a low-voltage variety (a dance with an innkeeper, some dialogues with a gloomy boy named Valter, and so on), this long stretch — the bulk of the novel — is, frankly, hard going.

As an avant-garde firebrand in the 1960s, Handke wrote an “anti-play” titled “Offending the Audience,” but now his strategy has shifted perilously close to Boring the Audience to Tears. Much like the narrator imagining the character of the fruit thief, I kept trying to envision a subset of readers who genuinely find this stuff delightful. Lacking most of the elements that draw people to fiction — insight, suspense and so on — it falls to either the language or the narrative material itself to make the novel worth the reader’s while. Although both have their moments — a mad speech in the final pages, an interlude at an inn that takes on the lighting and atmosphere of old European folk tales — the meal served up by this deeply eccentric novelist is spare and saltless, with no wine and no dessert. I suspect it’s the destiny of such an uncompromising writer as Peter Handke to end up writing basically for an audience of one. His most loyal readers, perhaps, adopt an attitude of veneration, hushed and solemn and more or less bored, the way many people attend Mass.