Reading Handke

I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump to start the year. It’s not that I haven’t been reading. I finished a book (Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains) in January's first few days, and then dug into Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings , whose translator Max Lawton is the subject for my next The Translator’s Voice interview.

The Beginnings isn’t particularly difficult nor a slog, but it is still a 600-page translated Italian novel; and a perplexing one, at that. It took me quite a while to get through it for the interview, and by the time I finished, I was six or seven books “behind” on my goal. Now, a goal is just a goal; I want to beat it, but not just for the sake of it. But even I had to admit I was in a funk. After sticking with one work for so long, I felt like I wasn’t reading nearly as much as I wanted, even though I was moving forward. So to kick-start myself back into reading, I decided to frontload my reading for a while with all of the shortest books on my list.

On my Boox Palma, I’ve loaded in a number of books, mostly classics or things that were recommended to me. Determining the length of ebooks can be a little goofy, but KOReader, the eReader app I use, lets you sort books by length. So I started just working my way up from the bottom.

The first book on the list was another Tsushima, Of Dogs and Walls ; I think with that, I’ve now read all of her books that have been translated into English (I guess it’s time to go read the remaining books in Japanese; though I’ve heard she can be quite difficult in her native tongue). Next on my list was Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.

Handke is a divisive author to say the least. He’s a Nobel Prize winner if that does anything for you (it shouldn’t), and perhaps one of the most controversial, as a denier of the Bosnian genocide and defender of war criminal and former Yugoslavian president Milošević. I'll be the first to admit that I know nothing of the Yugoslav wars, the massacres, or any of that part of history, to be frank, but obviously, it seems quite bad!

Since his statements, his Nobel Prize, Handke has continued to publish books, with a trio of novels coming out after 2020. I remember receiving one of them, unsolicited, from a publicist hoping I would cover it, and feeling a distinct sense of distaste seeing his name. I knew basically nothing about his work aside from that he had won the Nobel Prize, and quite notably denied the massacre and defended Milošević’s regime (and presumably still does).

I guess I’m of two minds about things like this. I think art is an inextricable creation of an artist , a person, so of course their beliefs, their personhood bleeds into their work; how else would it be? Because of this, the idea of purely “separating art from artist” seems both stupid and impossible. On the other hand, when I’ve read / seen / listened to works from other "cancelled" or condemned artists, I've basically never felt that their work is so vile it can’t be shared. I wouldn’t want to give any money to someone I find personally disgusting, but I also think there’s probably little harm for most people to just engage with it and see that it likely sucks anyways.

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All this to say, I’ve now read two works from Handke— A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and The Left-Handed Woman —and found both (but especially The Left-Handed Woman) quite moving. The Left-Handed Woman is about a woman who decides to separate from her husband, and the life she tries to carve out for herself and her child in the aftermath; the small circle of people that spring up around her afterwards. One of the things I found striking about it is its opacity. It’s a close-third perspective—we’re close to the characters yet we’re not her. We never jump into her thoughts. Handke never writes, “ Each day, I wondered if I was becoming more free or simply more alone ,” or something for her. In fact, he treats her at quite a distance; it’s hard to get a read on her.

This distance is something I’ve struggled with in my own fiction. It’s not that I’m fully bought into “show don’t tell” as a philosophy, in fact there’s a lot about that concept that bristles me, but I do find “telling” often feels a bit condescending. I want the mystery. I don’t want it to be totally clear what’s happening, what the characters are thinking. But I worry at times this leads my writing to come across as “cinematic.”

Lincoln Michel has written a bit about what he calls "TV brain prose," most recently in a post called What Not Reading Does to Your Writing. In it, he shares a sample of writing going around social media. It's a great post as usual, but here's the first part of the sample:

Judge Bristol declared her intent via a long, slow, animus blink. "Mr McKinnon, you are directed to answer the question." Her hand inched toward her gavel. I could willingly smash your face in with this thing.

The court's complement fell silent save for the sound of the stenographer busily tapping away at her keyboard.

The defendant smirked, shrugged, leaned back in the dock, and pushed his hands more deeply into his trouser pockets.

Okay, that's enough, we all know it sucks. But Lincoln identifies a couple of key points as to why it sucks. He calls attention to the lack of interiority , the non-specificity and unimportance of the gestures depicted , the linear flow of time, and the redundancy of the writing.

Now let's look at the opening to The Left-Handed Woman :

She was thirty and lived in a terraced bungalow colony on the south slope of a low mountain range in western Germany, just above the fumes of a big city. She had brown hair and gray eyes, which sometimes lit up even when she wasn’t looking at anyone, without her face changing in any other way. Late one winter afternoon she was sitting at an electric sewing machine, in the yellow light that shone into the large living room from outside. One entire side of the room consisted of a single pane of glass, looking out on the windowless wall of a neighboring house and on a grass-overgrown terrace with a discarded Christmas tree in the middle of it. Beside the woman sat her eight-year-old son, bent over his copybook, writing a school essay at a walnut table. His fountain pen scratched as he wrote, and his tongue protruded from between his lips. Now and then he stopped, looked out of the window, and went on writing more busily than ever. Or he would glance at his mother, who, though her face was averted, noticed his glance and returned it. The woman was married to the sales manager of the local branch of a porcelain concern well known throughout Europe; a business trip had taken him to Scandinavia for several weeks, and he was expected back that evening. Though not rich, the family was comfortably well off, with no need to think of money. Their bungalow was rented, since the husband could be transferred at any moment.

At no point in this paragraph above do we get any of the protagonist's thoughts directly, yet so much more meaningful information is revealed. This is a short novel, but we get a lot of the establishing information needed for the book, as well as a snapshot of the mental states of its characters without ever having to resort to using she thought.

A lot of this is simply factual, biographical information: she is 30, she lives in western Germany, she has a husband and an 8-year-old son, it is post-Christmas, etc. But it goes much deeper than that: she lives "above the fumes of a big city," implying comfort and distance; she averts her face from her son (why?) but returns his gaze; her husband has been away, through Christmas; "Their bungalow was rented," her life is precarious.

Handke's writing is brief and precise, and I greatly enjoyed the works of his I've read so far. And perhaps a good model for how to refine my own writing going forward.

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