Once Again for Thucydides. This item is unavailable.Once Again for Thucydides

Once Again for Thucydides is a collection of seventeen micro-epics written on trips around the world. In each brief journal entry, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their simple, unadorned validity. What results is a work or remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of random objects and discovers their inner working and mystery.

History is not all battles and great leaders, nor huge social forces and turbulent change. Instead, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke suggests in this set of prose-poem-like essays, it embodies small moments, tiny fragments of landscape and memory. Set mostly in post-World War II Western Europe and the Balkans, his vignettes center on history's forgotten people and places: a young girl in Yugoslavia "wearing a bright frayed bandage on her knee," an ash tree in Munich near a triumphal arch "with its peculiar inscription, 'Dedicated to victory--destroyed by war--admonishing peace.'" Perhaps the most effective essay is a small narrative of the different hats one encounters in a Balkan city: kepis, berets, helmets, ski caps, fezzes, and all the other gear that separates one tribe from another. --Gregory MacNamee