My Year in the No-Man'S-Bay - Hardcover

Handke, Peter; Winston, Krishna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374217556 ISBN 13: 9780374217556

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

An Austrian writer looks back on his failed relationships, from his tenuous connection to his son to an abortive love affair with a onetime Miss Yugoslavia, struggling to do justice to their complexity in his next novel.

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Reviews

"Almost fifty-six now, I still do not know myself," explains the brooding narrator of Austrian novelist/essayist Handke's (The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling) sinuously beautiful latest novel, a meditation on two decades of a writer's life culminating in a solitary, sobering year of reckoning. Most recently, Handke wrote a highly subjective look at the turmoil in the former Yugoslavia (A Journey to Rivers); here, he returns to the often stiflingly solipsistic terrain familiar to his readers with an attempt (admittedly failed) at a "Germanic epic," a travel work about journeys of discovery. Finding the right place to live seems to be the major preoccupation of his narrator, an ex-lawyer who is fascinated by Roman law and the poetry of Friedrich H?lderlin. Ensconced on and off over two decades in a house in a back-bay suburb of Paris, he has "renounced a life of action," content now to act merely as an observer, keeping the "chronicler's distance." He records discreet stories of his friends, referred to only by their descriptive namesA"the singer," "the reader," "my son," etc.Ayet finds that in the end he himself is the most interesting character in his narrative. Deserted periodically by his elusive wife ("the woman from Catalonia") and distrusted by his son ("the child"), he spends the final year (1999) taking walks, picking mushrooms and composing a suitable narrative. Despite attaining moments of stylistic lucidity worthy of Montaigne, the narrator more often comes across as gloomy and hostile. Nonetheless, numerous trenchant moments of insight make this work intriguing and provocative. Winston's translation is impeccable.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A writer's ``metamorphosis'' from confident creator into a passive ``observer and chronicler'' who drops out of the milieu thats sustained him forms the core of this ponderous, yet fascinating, impressionistic autobiographical novel by the noted Austrian playwright and fiction writer (A Journey to the Rivers, 1997, etc.). Handke's narrator, who both is and is not his creator, is a former lawyer turned successful author whose ambition had been to write ``a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them.'' Knowing himself a failure, he retreats to a remote hamlet (which he dubs an inland ``bay'') near Porchofontaine, outside Paris. There, he cultivates friendships with several people (among them a gifted painter and filmmaker; a Woman Friend,'' who is both something more than that and a former Miss Yugoslavia; and a rebellious priest)--all potentially useful characters as well as aspects of his own inquisitive psyche. Rueful memories of separation from his wife Ana (``the woman from Catalonia'') and son Valentin (whos inherited his father's restlessness) are juxtaposed against other recollections of the narrator's past, political and literary ruminations (we learn a great deal about what are presumably Handke's aesthetic principles and tastes), and--in this bulky volume's most egregious miscalculation--a lengthy series of ``observations'' of his ``bay's'' distinctive geographical and ethnographic features: It's as if Robinson Crusoe had set up camp near Walden Pond, met John McPhee and Franz Kafka, and absorbed the former's interests and the latter's style and sensibility. But much of the novel is a lot better than that. The narrator has the wit to challenge the sincerity of even his most heartfelt outpourings--which are (or soon will be) literary expressions. The writing throughout is both painstakingly self-conscious and superbly lucid; we feel everywhere the pressure of an agile, well-stocked mind insistently scrutinizing itself. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one--and arguably an indispensable gloss on Handke's unusual and provocative oeuvre. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Austrian Handke's last U.S. publication was a nonfiction book on Yugoslavia, A Journey to the Rivers (1997). This novel, essentially a reflection by a writer back over the course of his life, moves comfortably among the stories of his friends, such as "The Singer" or "The Reader," as well as the more intimate and sadder tales of his son, from whom he is estranged, his failed marriage with "The Catalan," and an unsuccessful love affair with a Miss Yugoslavia. But eventually, the reader returns to what ultimately interests the writer the most: himself. "I still get lost here; and I find that all right for this region of mine." It would be impossible for the reader, however, to become lost here, as Handke gently guides us with his miraculous prose through the writer's obsessions. This work lacks the cool tension of Handke's earlier and shorter The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) and Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974). This is a novel of pure consciousness: quiet, seductive, tremendously human, and, ultimately, deeply memorable. Beautifully translated. Brian Kenney

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374217556
• ISBN 13: 9780374217556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 468