QUIET PLACES

Wide-ranging personal essays from one of Western literature’s more controversial authors.

Plenty of artists are a mixed bag, but the dichotomy Handke (b. 1942) presents is starker than most. The recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature, he is an unquestionably gifted author with an impressive oeuvre. Yet he takes strident political stances, such as his support of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with war crimes. Both sides of Handke, the former more than the latter, appear in these five essays. Topics include his perpetual search for quiet spaces, a quest that expressed “if not a flight from society, perhaps a revulsion against society, an aversion to society”; a defense attorney he calls “my friend the mushroom maniac, who’s vanished without a trace”; insomnia and “the divergent views of the world engendered by different kinds of tiredness,” including fatigue borne of political struggles; an attempt to write about jukeboxes, a mission he quickly found insignificant given that year’s political events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall; and a meditation on elements that constitute a successful day, whether for an author’s writing or for humankind in general. Handke makes curious statements—e.g., calling Austrians “the first hopelessly corrupt, totally incorrigible people in history, incapable of repentance or conversion”—and the prose, at least in translation, can get flamboyant: “Tell me about this successful day. Show me the dance of the successful day. Sing me the song of the successful day!” Yet the author is also admirably self-critical, asking in the essay on the trivial topic of jukeboxes at a time of world upheaval, “Was there anyone in the present time, when every day was a new historic date, more ridiculous, more perverse than himself?” The book also contains some welcome light touches, as when, in the essay on tiredness, he asks of himself, “Why so philosophical all of a sudden?”

Nuanced essays from a challenging writer whose appeal varies widely.