In The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke offers no confession, no development. The writer walks through snow, pauses in a café, returns home. What occurs is not action but the texture of attention. Solitude here is not thematised. It is the medium in which perception takes form.
The writing resists shape. Even a dream, abrupt and grotesque, passes without shift in register. Nothing is explained. The narrator does not speak of isolation, yet it is everywhere: in the unbroken silences, in the refusal of conclusion, in the fact that the book can end with the writer’s return to work as if nothing has happened. And perhaps nothing has.
Reading it does not resolve solitude but clarifies its workings. A reader does not accompany the narrator; one follows, and eventually begins to see as he sees. By the end, the only event is the persistence of writing.
I always go back to Handke and Mann so this sounds pretty great to me.
Thanks for this, Anthony. I enjoyed the interview very much. The book on which I’m working at the moment owes a lot to Thomas Mann. Will I read Handke and Marguerite Duras? At some time… Maybe your post and this Espedal interview will be the stimulus for that. Will I read Espedal? Maybe, too. Right now, I’m reading a lot of Patrick Modiano and then who knows? Best wishes.
I’m considering my next Mann at the moment, probably Buddenbrooks to which Espedal refers in that interview.
i should have a stern word with you calling rilke’s prose incoherent, but it doesn’t matter. all the reading is good, wherever you get your ‘minutely observed ligths and shadows’ from…
i read espedal about two years ago and enjoyed it a fair bit as well.
you’ll do yourself a big favour in also reading scott’s bikebook, it’s truly wonderful:
http://doublevisionbooks.wix.com/wildridesandflowers
http://fortlaufen.blogspot.de/search/label/Scott%20Abbott%20%26%20Sam%20Rushforth
I love Rilke’s Malte, and attempting to understand what he is trying to say might be difficult occasionally but I enjoy every moment. Incoherency doesn’t diminish in any way the brilliance of his prose.
I spotted the bikes book, but hadn’t seen your post on it. With your recommendation I shall definitely give it a go.
I believe that if one is a curious and idiosyncratic reader, reading is a journey not a destination. You hit upon one writer and paths open up leading forward and backwards from that writer to others (to the influenced and the influences. No writer, or reader for that matter, stands in isolation. I find myself staring at Handke, for example, and several paths have converged over the course of the past year to lead me here. I suspect there are too many significant writers to guarantee that Mann or Duras or Handke are guaranteed to arise on every reader’s path. But there will be others. That is the true joy of reading.
We might disagree on just how many writers there are of the significance of Mann, Duras or Handke, but I took Espedal’s comment to be one of infinite monkeys and infinite time. Read long and hard enough and too many reading paths will lead to Mann and Duras for sure, Handke maybe.
Hi Anthony. That Handke essay/review is in my forthcoming book, so please redirect the link* to an online bookstore of your choice 🙂
*Only joking
Hi Steve. I’m looking forward to your book. When I first discovered your blog, I printed off many of your posts so I could read offline, so this is a major upgrade to those old battered, annotated print outs.