Don Juan: His Own Version - Hardcover

Handke, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374142319 ISBN 13: 9780374142315

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

A MODERN MASTER'S WRY AND ENTERTAINING TAKE ON HISTORY'S BEST-KNOWN LOVER

In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his take on the famous seducer. Don Juan's story―"his own version"―is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.

In this brief and wry volume, Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

About this title

About the Author

PETER HANDKE was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many works include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in No-Man's Bay, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG.

Reviews

Don Juan catapults over a garden wall and into the life of an anonymous narrator in this short, frustrating novel. Over the course of a week, the narrator, a lonely French innkeeper, listens to Don Juan relate the adventures that culminate with his arrival at the inn. In the preceding seven days, Don has traveled from Tbilisi to Damascus, Norway, Holland and then to the last country, completely nameless before making his way to the French inn. The reason for his travels is never made clear, nor is his motivation for relating his story to the innkeeper. This sense of mysterious imbalance is compounded by the narrator's recounting of Don Juan's tales, which often deal with seductions and couplings either offstage or with clinical swiftness. The pointedly dry story about a character famous as a connoisseur of pleasures holds interest as a concept, but the novel's entertainment value is quickly buried under a pile of unanswered questions, and the endless deferring of literal and figurative climaxes feels almost like punishment. (Feb.)
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Over the garden wall of an inn southwest of Paris, whose chef-proprietor is failing as a restaurateur, the legendary seducer leaps one May afternoon, fleeing a black-leather-clad couple on a motorcycle. Given a meal, he remains seven days, on each evening of which he relates his experiences of the corresponding day of the week preceding. He has been through a “womantime,” encompassing amorous encounters in Tbilisi, Damascus, Ceuta, Holland, Norway, and a “completely nameless” country—a prodigious itinerary, especially given the horse-drawn carriage in which he has traveled, driven by a servant he has recruited as effortlessly as he has managed to have the proprietor cook for him. He never has any trouble finding servants, it seems, nor amours. Everyone obliges him without his lifting a finger, and yet he feels—and is—always pursued. Handke’s perfectly suave novella is a rich tapestry of contradictions about desire and class that, besides its other pleasures, tweaks us with the facts that the chef, not Juan, narrates it and that it provocatively begs the question, Version of what? --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374142319
• ISBN 13: 9780374142315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112