THE AFTERNOON OF A WRITER

by Peter Handke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1989

Dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald (and titled in reference to Fitzgerald's idea of how to sum up his own last, defeated works), Handke's 80-odd-page rune follows a writer from his desk on a good morning (""Every word, not spoken but written, that led to others, filled his lungs with air and renewed his tie with the world""), through his small European town for a walk, and finally back home again--during which the writer's tenuous connection with reality has been badly strained: he comes home a kind of wreck. Handke's by now familiar procedure of synesthesia--of notation of all small sensations in an extremely slow manner (if there's a Handke aesthetic, it is slowness)--moves the writer from elation to fear and paranoid near-hallucination: ""Even those representing themselves as couples, holding hands or even with their arms around each other, broke apart the moment they caught sight of him and, visibly relieved at not having to play 'couple' anymore, began to talk about him."" At the end of the harrowing afternoon, the writer returns to his house and his work (""something that rotates on its axis without the help of a flywheel; something whose elements hold one another in suspense; something open and accessible to all, which cannot be worn out by use"") and the self-recognition that a writer is not quite human in the accepted sense of a social, participatory being. With some sharp but eerily unspecific jibes at literary politics and the ambivalence of fame, Handke gives a structure to this stroll through limbo. But it's in his most personal, most unself-pitying, semiautobiographical works that Handke most securely connects with emotion (be it generally gray emotion) and so here too: a tiny splinter of self-knowledge, affecting far out of proportion to its bulk. Haunting.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION