“You may fancy an artist’s work as much as Foie
Gras despite the chance that if you meet
that artist in person it will be the goose.” Freely, after Arthur Koestler.800-364-3039
ALEXIA, THE FRUIT THIEF by Peter Handke
http://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/die_obstdiebin_-_oder_-_einfache_fahrt_ins_landesinnere-peter_handke_42757.html
T.O.C.
I – OPENING, GENERAL DESCRIPTION
II- BACKGROUND, EPICS ETC. – 10
III-AND WHO IS “ALEXIA” & CAVELING
IV- DESCRIPTION CTD. - 36
V-SPECFICS & SOME CAVILING a-z
VI-NOTES
=I=
HANDKE’S DIE OBSTDIEBIN / ALEXIA, THE FRUIT
THIEF – a verbally and narratively marvelous portmanteau of a wandering Handke book
–
translation of whose deceptive German sub-title
einfache_fahrt_ins_landesinnere
http://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/die_obstdiebin_-_oder_-_einfache_fahrt_ins_landesinnere-peter_handke_42757.html
“An Ordinary Trip to the…Heartland”
would do the title trick, too,
in ONE respect____
could not be a simpler book:
A NO-MAN’S BAY author sets out in high summer
August days
"This story began on one
of those midsummer days on which if you walk barefoot in the grass you will get
the first bee sting of the year. At least that is what kept happening to me,
though meanwhile I know that the days of the first and often unique annual bee
sting usually coincide with the white clover starting to bloom, at ground
level, where the bees, half-hidden,
scurry about.”
on an expedition into the Picardie, a
picturesque region north of Paris where the likes of Van Gogh, too, have found
visual inspiration, and first acquaints us with the goings on in his immediate
surround – fans of the great NO-MAN’S BAY
may be interested how those environs have fared
- and in Chaville; then takes a trip to Paris and further, highly observant, to
the initial stop destination, Clergy-Pointoise – that is the first fourth of
the book at which point he substitutes Alexia, the incidental Fruit Filcher, a
rural religiously inflected flaneur vagabond in her mid-twenties, most
adventurously explores in three days the 60 kilometer stretch from
Clergy-Pointoise via Chars to Chaumont sur Oesne along the river Voisne and on the
Vexin Plateau.
Here, the links to visuals of these locales/
Images of the river Oise:
To
Chaumont & the river Troesne
Of HANDKE in his NO-MAN’S BAY ABODE, and of,
CHAVILLE
which – as he - the Austro-German-Slovenian author
– states - in FRUIT THIEF as well as in NO-MAN’S-BAY - has been an immigrant
haven for a long time.
Those who have read the book and then check out
the links will be smitten by the potency of Handke’s powers of description.
https://tinyurl.com/ycl7bdrs
ALEXIA, FRUIT THIEF, thus, could function as
the most delightful guide book to this stretch of the Picardie, or as an
idiosyncratic compliment or conjunction to the more official boring kind to an
area, meanwhile rife with touristy inns!
As we find out from Handke’s longtime - occasionally
Handke-fired but reinstated - Suhrkamp editor Raimund Fellinger
ALEXIA, THE FRUIT THIEF – a book of 150 k + was
written - by hand in pencil - between the months of September and December 2016,
and thence, in galleys, underwent Handke’s now customary emendations.
It might
go without saying though the saying in this instance becomes quite interesting:
the reason why ALEXIA necessarily underwent considerable preparation [though
probably not in further exploration of NO-MAN’S-BAY environs that Handke must know
as he does the back of his hand], but of the Picardie, for that stretch of land
to be portrayed in such ravishing detail – for an author to know each minor hamlet in the
area even a genius fast perceiver like Handke requires time and footwork - explanations
for which close acquaintance is I would think that Handke and his second wife
Sophie Semin have bought themselves a rural abode in the region, the second out
of Paris home for Sophie who - see MORAWIAN NIGHT – escaped the “cold
salamander” NO-MAN’S-BAY abode that is reserved for “cold salamander”
preparations of veritable manu-scripts, where Sophie – note the abundance of
books - failed to transform herself into a book. [1]
ALEXIA, FRUUIT THIEF might, thus, also be
fruitfully read in conjunction with the NO-MAN’S BAY author’s other recent
expedition, the one to Paris - THE GREAT FALL - which ALEXIA references so
acutely toward the end during a stretch when she suffers what might be called
“a soul’s dark day in bright sunlight” – i.e. the parallel state of mind
between the two books in that respect – and yet the soul, though it seems to
want to, does not quite inhabit St. Teresa of Avila or vice vera.
THE GREAT FALL is finally
being published, this 2018 Spring, by Seagull via U. of Chicago Press, and
provides the other side of this NO-MAN’S-BAY dweller’s existence. [I regard
FALL a kind of successor to THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER, and equally troubling
except of course for the writing.]
Here the link to THE GREAT FALL
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/G/bo28483408.html
and to Scott Abbott’s and my discussion of it
& to the customary collection of reviews.
=II=
In light of the foregoing suggestion that FRUIT
THIEF can also be read as a guide to a particular stretch in the Picardie I
image that Handke could have easily have
just done a variant of one of his travel accounts, condensations
from his notebooks, such as AM FELSFENSTER
MORGENS or GESTERN UNTERWEGS YESTERDAY/ON THE ROAD
and not bothered with the exertion of inventing
his surrogate, Alexia, and on the train already is on the lookout for her who
then turns the exploration of the Picardie into an adventure story that I read
with the same excitement that I as a kid used to read Karl May - not an
experience I ever thought I would have with a Handke book.
Via Handke’s
doppelganger Alexia, the fruit thief’s wanderings become the subject of the
narration which becomes ever more playful and adventurous, with a host of side
essays, anv vignettes, quite a bit more alacritous {my favorite word these days
that I am no longer so meself1] as Handke, now in his 70s, might be himself –
getting all wrapped up in a blackberry thicket? - at least physically. It is in
this fashion that FRUIT THIEF becomes an agglomeration with all kinds of asides
– a real Handke book – impure – agglomeration being a term that the book itself
uses when describing [in such great detail!] the Picardie town of Clergy-Pointoise
which French rationalization has assembled and made weird after WW II - and
Handke uses agglomeration as the French have and with I would think entirely
unintentional irony, unaware I expect that the term might also be used to
describe the FRUIT THIEF portmanteau whose “modern” features may or may not be
intended by an author proudly conservative in many ways.
Not only does Handke seem to have a lot of fun
with the monologues and other digressions - the dramalets - integration of his
abilities as a dramatist [more on that aspect anon - and on
some individual brief essay-like passages - that
break but, surprisingly I must say, never slow the underlying narrative drive once
the adventure into the Picardie is underway after Alexia’s one night at
Clergy-Pontoise, and it is a strong narrative drive I never expected from
Handke who usually manages to slow things down - but I guess it just goes to
show that a claim he wrote me at the time he completed A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING
that he had reached a stage where he was “capable of doing everything in his
writing”, that he had the kind of command if you are in charge of all the instruments
in a symphony orchestra.
Subsequent to translating
WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES and ever after, especially with HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF
EACH OTHER, I have had no reason to doubt his claim.- And it is the sort of
thing that ought to make you shiver it is so spooky!
Handke is an exhibitionist
with something to exhibit. Each of his exhibitions is a “look Ma’, no hands,”, a
Seiltanz, and though a few of his
works and acts were scandals - his initial public appearance in Princeton in
1966, the premiere of PUBLIKUMSBESCHIMPFUNR/ OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE, and JOURNEY
TO THE RIVERS
his appearance at the funeral of Slawomir Milosevic’s
is the only instance in which he made the world at large – and the world is no Backfisch – blush.
However, the adventure as
a whole, Alexia’s, is not any old adventure – it has stages, it has an ordeal,
Alexia acquires a male follower, a Pizza delivery boy who attaches himself to
her, but whom she does not tell to go away as she delightfully addresses a dog
that won’t stop following her. For a stretch she turns into Hamletina, there is
an amazing act of salvation – of a moribund cat! And perhaps in that sense
Alexia’s journey is analogous to a kind of passion. However,
Handke has said a number of times, as well as
in ALEXIA, FRUIT THIEF itself [towards the end] that his idea of epic narration
is modeled or inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the 13th century
author of Parzifal and of Wolfram’s Willehalm. And he also states that no
story of his can tell itself – it requires the intrusion of the narrator and he
does here any number of times saying “that’s how the story want
‘s it”.
FRUIT THIEF mentions the
name of Wolfram a few times and refers directly to Willehalm at the end and FRUIT THIEF also sprinkles in some French,
but in fact that’s pretty much the only matters that these two so
entirely different epics have in common.
“Its [Willehalm’s] account of conflict between
Christian and Muslim cultures, centering on the warrior-saint Willehalm and his
wife Gyburc, a convert from Islam, challenges the ideology of the Crusades. It
celebrates the heroism, faith, and family solidarity of the Christians, but
also displays the suffering of both sides in the war and questions the
justification of all killing. Gyburc, whose abandonment of her Muslim family
and conversion to Christianity are the immediate cause of the war, bears a
double burden of sorrow, and it is from her that springs a vision of humanity
transcending religious differences that is truly remarkable for its time. In
Gyburc's heathen brother Rennewart and his love for the French king's daughter,
Wolfram also develops a richly comic strand in the narrative, with the outcome
left tantalizingly open by the work's probably unfinished conclusion. .. Wolfram's supreme qualities as a story-teller.”
Handke, who - early on - noticed how his equal as artificer
James Joyce had managed to assure himself of continued scholarly attention and,
thus, of one feasible continued life for his work, pulls the wool over the eyes
of current scholars, leads them down the garden path, sie gehen ihm auf den Leim, they invariably seem to fall into the
trap and buy his red herrings, most grievously here the professor reviewer for
LITERATUR KRITIK who falls for Handke’s suggestion hook line and sinker!
Pal and admired scholar Scott Abbott fell for
the suggesting that MORAWIAN is a book about narration – as though Handke
required a tome of 500 + pages for that purpose!? - these dear people miss that
Handke wrote an earlier version of Moravian called SAMARA
that was already typeset at which point the
author discovered opportunities to elaborate; and since he is the publisher’s
star author he is indulged and the first setting is junked but ends up with the
Austrian handke.online research site.
MORAWIAN has the kind of
open-ended set-up that would allow Handke to add any number of further chapters
once he’d got a drift of how or whether to present them with equal metaphoric
dramatic aplomb and painterly force; that is the Morawa, the boat on which these “A Thousand Night” tales are told,
could be set adrift down the Morawa River into the Danube and end up in the
Black Sea.
MORAWIAN NIGHT features
not only quite a bit of walking and all over the map, especially but not
exclusively in the Balkans, and has its share of Handke’s wonderfully described
bus rides, too, and is rich in the kind of Handke raisins that will keep the
scholars busy busy busy.
Oh yes, Wolfram provides the
appropriate – to high summer weather that pervades the entire book - opening
epigraph:
Man gesach den lichten summer
in so maniger varve nie
[Never have you seen high
summer in such many-splendored colors!]
Filip Kobal’s focused
wanderings in THE REPETITION had a Parsifal-like quality. Yet Handke’s five
epic novels – THE REPETITION, MY YEAR IN
THE NO-MAN’S BAY, BILDVERLUST, ACROSS THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS, MORAVIAN NIGHT,
and the current FRUIT THIEF are all very different kinds of epics
FRUIT THIEF [2017] is Handke’s fifth epic of a
kind of “monstrum” he once promised he would never commit [thinking they would
remain incomplete, e.g. like Musil’s, who died prematurely in exile in
Switzerland of a heart attack in 1942].
Each of Handke’s major
oeuvre of the epic kind – not including the one would-be monstrum that Handke
left the way he had feared he might – are major exertions and have specific
wandering locales and no matter how different from each other narratively – it
is typical for Handke not to repeat himself or as little as possible - and what
a nuisance for reviewers and the like – these epics are wandering walking
novels – written by an author who noted in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES that
“It has become hard to
walk on the earth,” as indeed it has with the impediments to human and to
animal locomotion that the Autobahn builders have put in their way, as they
have in the Picardie as well.
Many shorter
works, too, e.g. the novel ONE DARK NIGHT and the assayings ON THE JUKE BOX
& ON FATIGUE contain amazing descriptions of walking’s pleasures and difficulties.
1] Langsame Heimkehr / A SLOW HOMECOMING
[the novel part of that American edition which includes CHILD STORY & ST.
VICTOIRE]
is the
one incomplete Handke work, which I believe was meant to have epic proportion -
Handke referred to his plans as a “Staatsroman” – a kind of official
undertaking!? the size of a state? – at any event, something grand that perhaps
was meant to demonstrate explore a continuity of large geologic forms?; its
protagonist Sorger, a geological surveyor, the novel’s inception in a fairly
pristine Alaska – it is dedicated “to the snow” [!]- hints at epic ambitions of
that kind…
It was I who pointed
Handke to Alaska around 1970 when he wrote asking what American winters were
like, though he seemed to have forgotten all about the suggestion by the time
he returned from Alaska in 1978 - as he did other matters - to NY to write the
book.
SLOW HOMECOMING’S opening Alaska chapter had a
profound effect on me for my having spent nine months in that vastness -
fighting forest fires and as a surveyor - see
from the last chapter of my Screen Memories] - traipsing and boating
the length and breadth of that huge area as far north as the Brooks Range,
inducing an experience of wholeness and immensity of a kind that is more than
oceanic or otherly oceanic and that remained unresolved until I read Handke’s
chapter… May you, too, have experiences of that kind to resolve!... Great San
Francisco chapter, but then the text sort of “peters” out – perhaps the locale
and time where and when Handke wrote these parts and then, exceptionally, ran
out of words – he had been rehearsing its first sentence… “Sorger had outlived many of those who had become close to him; he had
ceased to long for anything but often felt a selfless love of existence and at
times a need for salvation so palpable it weighed on his eyelids,”… for
years on end! [FN
- in the Hotel Adams on East 86th
Street in Manhattan in a room with a view of Central Park in a quiet very upper-class
area. -
Perhaps adverse 1978/9 NY conditions are to
blame, or over-eagerness to make the transition from less ambitious stuff - I
know of no other uncompleted Handke prose work; a few plays expired in draft
stage, and but for certain matters which I will address in a footnote I would have asked Handke to go with me when I
stopped working around 10-11p.m at my Tribeca office and hit my downtown bars
and music clubs CBGBS and MUDD and SCREECH where the pretty ones when they
wanted you told you up front, love making became like breathing, and it
happened to be the rare time that I had not a main squeeze, and Handke, if he
had wanted, would at least have a bit of a good time to look back upon. That NY
period then disabused him of his once explored idea - for him and his daughter Amina
- to live in Manhattan or its suburbs.
Up until SLOW HOMECOMING
Handke had written a handful of often ambitious and complex but also typically
laconic condensed short books, [FN] and survived a major crisis upon the
suicide of his mother, and the first wife going disparu to his director Klaus
Peymann for about as good and valid cause as wife can have to leave a
neglectful layabroad who only writes or wants to talk about writing – epic
intention can be said to be perhaps hinted at in the immediately preceding LEFT-HANDED
WOMAN – 1976 - or can be found retrospectively latent.
For WALK ABOUT THE
VILLAGE, part IV of his ‘home coming’ cycle, however, Handke was prepared,
prepared himself as you can read in the untranslated - into English - [its
predecessor Weight of the World had done well] Geschichte des
Bleistifts / History of the Pencil [FN].
At any event, it was nearly
ten years before Handke then completed the first epic walking novel and what a
book it is!
THE REPETIION rewalks a post-graduation trip
and refigures SORROW BEYOND DREAMS and is certainly one of the most important
Handke books for me who happened to read it while under the influence of the
slow pounding surf of the Pacific, waves that roll in all the way from storms
in the South Pacific and so was in a state of mind that I could respond to the
book‘s pace and rhythm. And not only for me:
Of the invariable ludicrous reviews that the NY
Times Book Review has bestowed
on Handke’s major efforts the most idiotic and
impertinent was of THE REPETIION where David Price Jones inveighs against the
protagonist – an 18-year old - for not lambasting Tito whose image appears
during his perambulation through Slovenia and its Carso following the footsteps
of a horticulturalist uncle to Ljubljana. The fellow who wrote this and the
editor who published this review ought at the very least to have been flogged,
if not shot; capital punishment in egregious cases of this kind might just do
the trick of preventing the like of this kind of review. Jones is one of the
four NY TIMES reviewers of the four NY Times reviewers of these major titles –
others are Siegel, on NO-MAN’S BAY, a Neil Gordon of SIERA DEL GREDOS, and one
Joshua Cohen/ MORAWIAN NIGHT [lets not forget the NYRB and the hacks that a tired
Bob Silvers used, Adam Kirsch and the Marcus]
who can
regard themselves as fortunate not to have run into me while I was in the
Chihuahua and carrying side arms as I rode out and made sure that the overhead
vultures accompanying me were well-fed!
Take a look at the Guardian
review for compare:
2] One Year in the No-Man’s Bay 1994
walks not something approximate a straight line
but CIRCLES - about half a dozen times - while exploring the half dozen sides
of an artist, a circling that is prefigured in the preparatory assaying THE
ESSAY ON THE DAY THAT WENT WELL which circles Paris ever more rapidly, among
other matters it accomplishes. Handke,
now well prepared for the marathon, wrote the 250 k opus in one year and by
pencil – first and final draft but for some work in galleys - his congratulatory
publisher, the Gauner Siegfried
Unseld, finding an m.s. of this kind
unacceptable a typist was found; and Handke has been rewriting and adding in
galleys ever since. - Note my report about how good reading this book five
times in one year made me feel – testimony to Peter Strasser’s Handke,
ein Freudenstoff / Handke’s joy-producing
Stuff
not that anyone but the fewest of the few in
this godforsaken nerve-dead country seems to have been so affected. I account
for this effect on me – who might have reasons not to be so affected by matters
Handke – by Handke even intra-uterine having been a mother’s ultra love-child,
surrogate for the love of beautiful Maria Sivec’s life, and then just look at
the photos of her and baby Peter, how their eyes are in love with each other
PHOTO
As mama’s boy Handke who with all that
autobiographical writing might be a bit more aware than he seems at times yet eventually
realizes he received a bit too much of a good thing, and that surfeit has
entered what he loves most and then spills over to a good reader like meself –
now you go falsify that claim of mine!
Siegel’s review in the New
York Times needs to be compared with William Gass’s to show why fraud Siegel
ought to have been strung up ages ago.
3] Across the Sierra del Gredos
[Bildverlust] 2004
memorializes Handke’s travels and walking tours
in a particular region – the la Mancha - Spain and uses an impersonation of a
BANKIERESS for the same reason that he uses Alexia in FRUIT THIEF: to free
himself from his notebook and to be imaginative and playful and suggest
alternatives, though the Banker side of Handke is less appealing than that of
the almsgiving Stair-dweller Saint! But since those trips to Spain were in the
company of ultra-wealthy magazine publisher Burda the ultra-competitive pasha -
that too is Handke - may have invented the Bankieress for that purpose; or she
incorporates some Burda sides, who knows? – However, Neil Gordon the NY Times
reviewer has not been much heard of since I took exception to his travesty -
turns out once oldest and dearest friend Frank Conroy, then at the Iowa Writing
Workshop, told the ass to head East. Frank unfortunately wasn’t around anymore
for me to complain!
4] Moravian Night 2011 \
fellow Handke translator and aficionado if not
venerator Scott Abbott and I discussed at length and came to loggerheads on an
egg or chicken question. Scott felt that book’s subject was “narration”, as the
book at one instance claims, I maintain that Handke devised his own “Thousand
and One Night Scheherazade” to accommodate a host of auto-biographical matters
and does so in a few instances in the most supreme poetic way, and could have
gone on forever with the kind of Handke tales that amuse me and Mari Colbin who
and I nearly got married because we would never get bored telling each other
Handke stories – see her review of Malte Herwig’s Handke biography
which that sad case Herwig managed to get an
Austrian news service to withdraw with a threat of suing for a huge sum which
of course it would have taken a huge sum to defend.
No suit against me or
darling Mari! the sixth Handke wench I have come to know; and - as Freud
mentioned a few times - there is no better way of getting to know a person than
to know their sexuality in the bedroom.
To
summarize: Handke has been writing, compulsively as of necessity, more or less
formally imaginatively inflected auto-biography since the beginning. [FN]
Handke will be known as one of the great
Catholic novelists – say, Bernanos and
Walker Percy – a writer and dramatist
who - though touchingly anti-modern in some respects - malgre luis his allegiance to the logos has had little choice but
to be a forever innovator; so that the greater his fathoming of the past the
more playful and profound his innovations.
III
=IV= ALEXIA
At what point while
thinking of memorializing his perambulations in the Picardie did the idea of
using Alexia as a medium occur to Handke? For, initially, during the first
quarter of the book - set in the NO-MAN’S BAY environs - there is no
mention of her.
The
author sets out on a fine bee-sting high summer day but there is no mention
that he will be looking for Alexia the Fruit Thief. Only on the train to
Clergy-Pointoise
– nearly a quarter way
into the book - he mistakes a young woman all bundled-up for Alexia, and that
is how we find out that he is looking for her, and he finds her and with her,
sometimes through her eyes and ears, we first of all explore and dissertate on
the agglomeration Clergy-Pointoise… and - but for interesting authorial
descriptions, much later in the book, of what he the NO-MAN’S BAY writer is up
to, narrating in the first person singular or, later, for a while the plural
- Alexia remains his medium for the expedition from Clergy via Chars
always along the river Voisne to Claumond sur Oesne – a 60 kilometer hike that
feels like a it took a month – it is so rich in observed detail and thought.
.
Clergy-Pointoise itself is explored for not quite one day - one afternoon and
night and early morning - and I felt I really really knew the place and how to
get around it – testimony to Handke’s power as a writer to inscribe details
into my mind – but I can see no particular reason why Handke needed surrogate
Alexia to narrate his acquaintance with Clergy-Pointoise or to spend an amazing
night in a house in mourning or to describe the few old village parts that
rationalist modernization have spared, not consumed in this agglomeration:
great stuff! And narrated at diary easy-going pace. - Or Alexia being quite
unable to get back out of town as the hedged-in sub-urban circular developments
keep interposing themselves – you and I know them well from the US of A.
Anyhoo,
who is this Alexia that Handke needs her, to tell his Picardie story in the
form of an adventure? - First of all to make his acquaintance with
the region, acquired over a number of years, interesting and the pace certainly
picks up once Alexia hits… not the road but the river Viosne valley!
Generally speaking,
Alexia, methinks, is yet another of Handke’s surrogates, Josef Bloch,
Keuschnig, Sorger, Loser, Filip Kobal, etc., etc.
She is Handke’s
dissociated medium which points to his ability – manifested most manifestly in
GOALIE, where Bloch is presented as a paranoid schizophrenic, and via
grammatical sleight of hand puts the reader in that state of mind – which means
that Handke as a person is the very opposite of anything of the kind since he
seems, at least when writing, to be able to dissociate a medium surrogate and,
thus, has that rare ability also at other times – spooky, to understand a
schizophrenic state of mind – and I think at least the equal if not of a higher
order than Stephen Daedalus using the image of paring of fingernails on a
Rembrandt painting to describe the objectifying writing process [FN]
In that respect each of these mediums surrogates are cut from the cloth of
their author, amusingly as in the case of „Keuschnig” of A MOMENT OF TRUE
FEELNG & NO-MAN’S BAY – someone who dwells in an Austrian peasant’s hut and
is „keusch” – chaste, which Handke - though he used to need to make
serious attempts in that direction certainly was anything but for decades, and
which is the sort of thing that can get a layabroad into all kinds of trouble
and have consequences – the fear of that girl in the reeds in MORAVIAN
NIGHT that is ready to assassinate, and similar paranoia in NO-MAN’S BAY are
entirely justified, Erinyes all.
Sorger and Loser, too, indicate qualities of their creator,
the Bankieress presents me with identificatory problems but perhaps she is
Handke’s capitalist side to which he admitted to Mueller in one of his
interviews; that Taxham fellow who is used to write in dream grammar in ONE
DARK NIGHT is most interesting, and Alexia, St. Alexius twin, is being used
here most imaginatively and perhaps wishfully as the kind of youthful
adventurer the author is not quite anymore now in his 70s.
More specifically, Alexia is said to be the daughter
of the Bankieress from Crossing the Sierra del Gredos, irrelevantly
since this is just a novelistic touch which adds nothing and which Handke could
have spared himself. Chiefly, Alexia strikes me as the younger sister of the Lefthanded
Woman. [FN] She is chaste – not withdrawn from a husband yet she has the
chastest of dreams, a sixteen year old’s dream it reminded me of – and this is
the sole section that gives the reader an idea of who she is, as does her
behavior of not hooking up with her companion -
The dream allows the possibility of a future husband, and
though not entirely non-carnal, I find it hard to tell whether Alexia – who
earlier on suffers an amusing episode as Hamletina – might not be on the
opposite way to the kind of nunnery that Hamlet tells Ophelia to get to – or
even to assume the soul of St. Teresa of Avila who is mentioned in the
context. Alexia, the twin sister of St. Alexius under the Stairs
does not have her name because Handke is courting the
Amazon.com M Windows’ helpmate ‘Alexa!’
Come
the day that Handke makes his peace with the Internet even though the Austrian
state’s literature department has created a site for the material that he sold
them for a hefty sum.
How
truly wissenschaftlich / scholarly and scientific we are
going to be remains to be seen.
Alexia is presented as
a vagabond who has been all over the world – to lots of the same places that
Peter Handke has been: Alaska, Detroit, Spain’s Sierra del Gredos and is said
to have just returned from… has Handke been? … Siberia! However, associations
with these places are not even a bare minimum and don’t add anything much. Are
part of what strikes me as a rater desultory attempt to satisfy certain not
altogether pleasurable novelistic requirements. Sketchy and contradictory--
About as much as the disconcerting refrain that Alexia, a haute bourgeois
French dropout, is a fan of Eminem, no mention of French contemporary
chansonniers.
Alexia
also does quite a few things that Handke does in other “walking” books – such
as walk backwards prior to getting underway in a forward direction! She and
thresholds share the thresholders apprehensions in that respect.
She
seems to be in her mid-twenties - but as you get to know her she is a
twenty-something who does not hook up with young Valter - the pizza
delivery boy who - as compared the dog that is so amusingly told to split in
one of the book's wonderful theatrical passages - follows her like a human dog
- and they spend a night in separate rooms in the Auberge Dieppe and she has
that fascinating chaste dream - our Fruit Thief is said to have tramped all
over the world and gone half a year to the university in Pointoise but is
entirely atypical of such world travelers and of contemporary young women and
does not seem to be Laocadie, Handke’s 2nd daughter, though Handke might have
consulted Laocadie in some matters relating to young French women if he had had
real interest in rendering such.
I
have this hunch that Alexia only occurred to him about a quarter of the ways
into a book that might also have remained just a detailed account of one of his
expeditions with the Picardie, which would have been a well-developed but far
less interesting travel diary that would have been devoid these numerous
essayistic passages that indicate an author of some experience with existence
and are not penned by Alexia and have little if any bearing on her..
Alexia or
an adventurer like her might have been there at the bee-sting start, as
traveling companion who, e.g. regards the NO-MAN’S BAY with fresh eyes? - Why
this cumbersome way of suddenly looking for her and finding her? Not elegant at
all. Within the context of a lot of verbal razzmatazz Handke performs a few
mis-steps and does so in the way he describes the [his] analog - that he cites
on page x the star midfielder of PSG [Paris-St. Germain] who makes the
world’s most astonishing shots - a supreme genius - but is then awkward beyond
belief! -“tollpatchig” a deceased German critic who gave Handke the hardest of
time, called it, a supreme genius who can be bit of an idiot – idiots with whom
Handke feels such affinity as you read his texts! A bit like the KASPAR of a
play of his.
Alexia is said to be
the daughter of the Bankieress from Sierra del Gredos – a matter that
adds nothing, one aspect of ‘novelizing’ that Handke in rather ordinary and
desultory badly edited fashion exercises here; as little as finding out in
MORAWIAN NIGHT that Filip Kobal the protagonist of THE REPETION now writes film
scripts – the only time that this
“in-ness” of being in a Handke-world worked for me was when Josef Bloch,
the paranoid-schizophrenic murderer of GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK who
is arrested at the moment that the soccer ball, to his immense surprise, hits
his midriff, resurfaces in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES as one of the worker-clowns
and mucks around the woods frightening the natives.- Handke, once upon the time of A Slow Homecoming,
said he would never be novelistic in this fashion, and this way of being “in”
was something that used to annoy him in Thomas Mann. Alexia the vagabond can
wander anywhere she likes and does not need the obvious motivation of a not
overly exciting family get together as an excuse, we hear nothing about it
until the end as it is about to transpire. “That is how the tale wants it, the
way the tale tells it.” is a frequent imprecation by an author who admits at
the end that he, a dweller of the NO-MAN’S-BAY, is writing the book. He could
easily have come out and said, “It’s me Peter Handke, I am writing a Peter
Handke Book, and using Alexia will be a lot more fun, allows my imagination and
playfulness to roam as I can’t just do in a notebook or a travel account.” And
no one would mind – certainly not this late in the game.
Alexia’s expedition becomes s so rich
in adventurous richly detailed events that I felt
I had been underway for weeks – not just the three days for the 60 kilometers
from Clergy to Chaumond - a distortion of my sense of time which might be yet
one more of Handke’s customary head games – defamiliarization - that he has
been playing, differently each time, since OFFENDING, especially in The Ride
Across Lake Constance [fn] and THE REPETITION –
As
her creator’s magnificently observant eyes and ears during his exploration of a
stretch of the French country side, Alexia only rarely engages in incidental
filching of fruit her three day trek - once she takes over for Handke the
NO-MAN’S-BAY narrator - familiarizes the reader so intimately with the Picardie
– the three towns Clergy-Pointoise, Char and Chaumond and the river Voisne and
the Vexin plateau that I suspect future admirers will want to retrace these
footsteps - just as current admirers have followed Filip Kobal’s itinerary as
he traverses the Karst/Caro in Austro-Slovenian The Repetition./
Alexia at one point is
said to be on her expedition looking for her mother – why the Bankieress of all
people might be lost like that lost cat in these wilds is an issue that is
never explained, it makes no sense. Alexia smells her perfume in the tiny
chambre that she spends a saintly night in at the Auberge Dieppe, but then it
turns out that the object of her expedition was a family get together at the
end of her trip in Chaumont sur Oesne – no mention of anything of the kind
throughout and why that arduous adventure preceding a family get together?
It
seems to me that all this contradictory family material seems to have been made
up along the way as Handke was writing and felt that Alexia needed some kind of
novelistic architecture which I regard as entirely superfluous but for one
instance where Alexia receives the kind of a paternal advice that Handke might have
addressed to his own daughter and of which he is making fine fun here as a
persiflage. A few times, then, Alexia references something her father said. But
that is that.
Alexia
is given a brother ten years her junior, she calls him a few time, it turns out
he works at her final destination Chaumond sure Oesne as a carpenter’s
apprentice, and his profession affords Handke the opportunity to
once again sing that craft’s praises, which I - once upon graduation, and at
Breadloaf Writers on the weekends and nights, worked as a union tile
[Pollacks!] and {Wops] marble worker’s apprentice - entirely share. But there
was absolutely no need in this wonderful epic jaunt through the Picardie to
equip Handke’s surrogate eyes and ears with a family of any kind. Or to leave
this material in badly and contradictory fashion lying around like woodcuttings
at workbench that was not cleaned up. Was the book in that respect meant to be
left a bit “dirty?” - For all I know that may be intentional – the book is an
assemblage – not just an adventure story with some brilliantly recounted
adventures, but all kinds of small essays .
Are
his editors and first readers frightened of the fellow who I was appalled to
read recently gave his old-time Austrian editor Jung a tongue lashing? [fn] -
But I think I am wrong and Handke knows that the reviewers need a simple hook
for their work, a simple motivation, most of them mention that the object is a
family get-together or the search for the Bankieress mother - and not the “dark
day of the soul” that Alexia suffers and its reference to Handke’s THE GREAT
FALL, not that amazing near unending reprieve of the end of WALK ABOUT THE
VILLAGES with its even grimmer sayings such as “be enamored of your despair.”
[When will someone write a great dissertation on the influence of that great
play on Handke’s work for nigh forty years, how it keeps efflorescing?]
End
of some very minor caviling on a book that I am reading like a Peter Handke
book - but where I praise as highly as I do here, and I know the fellow knows
how to dissemble and play games and is self-indulgent as hell and I love nearly
every minute of it.
The way the narrative
is set up – “that’s the way the tale wants “-and with the author’s admission at
the end that he cannot imagine a story where the story teller does not admit of
his telling, that no story “tells itself” [but he would agree that dreams do I
imagine?]- he could have just said, say, after leaving Clergy-Pointoise
“I am now going to use my medium Alexia, for 1 she is nimbler for such a long
trek, and, secondly, that way I can write all kinds of little essays about what
transpires.” But I find it odd indeed that the two nights of her
expedition are spent, interestingly in both cases, in different inns, and I
wonder whether Handke ever sleeps - during his many country walks - say, under
the Hawthorne tree on an August moon, whether at the Bering sea he slept in an
igloo? – I note his many interestingly described hotel stays, including one in
the Kosovo, but wonder how hardy a vagabond he is while conceding that the
likes of Handke and the Norman Mailer of Why Are We in Vietnam, can
absorb, say, the wildflowers in the Brooks Range, in a day that take me a week
to incorporate.
Alexia’s expedition
becomes also a pilgrimage with ordeals and not so much resembles anything that Willehalm
might have experienced but someone seeking sainthood. - Alexia, the
twin sister of our old familiar St. Alexius Under the Stairs
IV=
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