THE BALLAD OF THE LAST GUEST

The Austrian novelist returns with a characteristically enigmatic story.

Gregor Werfer—we learn his first name a couple of dozen pages in, his last only near the end of Handke’s latest—is a cipher who has been “living and working for ages—his own—on another continent, or, as he called it, ‘part of the world.’” Just what he does there is something of a mystery, but there are plenty of clues that link him to the literary wanderer of old, Odysseus, “who from a young age had been obsessed with the unknown, the foreign, especially with experiences he could have all by himself, on his own.” Rather than fend off Circe or battle Polyphemus, however, Gregor has a more mundane task to perform: He’s returned to his family farm, a once-quiet place now being swallowed up by an encroaching city, the nearby chapel “surrounded by office towers, some of which grazed the sky.” There Gregor is supposed to take on the role of godfather at his infant nephew’s baptism, but beforehand he has to wrestle with the odd dynamics of his kin—and with the terrible news that his much younger brother has been killed while serving in the French Foreign Legion. Given that “it was an unspoken rule in the family, going back generations, that no questions were to be asked,” Gregor is in no hurry to get home and finds plenty of reason to hang out in local bars and hotels, albeit with a kind of Meursaultian indifference to his surroundings and fellow humans. Handke moves slowly, deliberately through the proceedings, occasionally taking potshots at the “couch potatoes, nook- and-cranny crouchers, shithouse stowaways, idiot-box starers,” and other manifestations of modern life. It’s not his most memorable work, but it’s still of some interest to the neoexistentialists in the audience.

Nothing much happens in these pages, though Handke fans will admire the moody atmospherics.