The Jukebox & Other Essays on Storytelling

A collection of three superb essays from a renowned prose stylist attempts to explore how language can work its magic on us, as the author meditates on subjects ranging from his Austrian boyhood to the music of the Beatles.

In Handke's metafictional title piece--a parable on self-evasion and writer's block--a traveler in Spain makes elaborate preparations to begin a long-planned essay about the jukebox, symbol of American pop culture. The transparent luminosity of the Austrian novelist/poet/memoirist's earlier books ( A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ) has given way, in the three essays gathered here, to a freewheeling, innovative, sometimes tedious experimentalism that pushes back the limits of narrative form. "Essay on Tiredness," a question-and-answer dialgoue, relates various types of fatigue and ennui to student rebellion, lovers' disenchantment, political apathy and so forth. In the concluding piece, a self-portrait by William Hogarth leads Handke to contemplate the idea of a "successful day," which springboards into a meditation on the art of living in the present moment. Handke seamlessly mingles memories, associations, precise observation, digressions and social commentary.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is the third volume of ``nonfiction'' from the prolific Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet (Absence, 1990), who often takes the writing life as subject. Handke delights in stretching his work across genres. Novels begin as screenplays, journal entries frequently record things as he'd have liked them to happen. Narration and description become interchangeable, as do representation and realization. Again, in these three essays, he toys with readers. ``Tiredness'' opens with the simplistic image of the little boy in church forcing his parents to take him home because he's tired, thus ruining the rest of their day. By the essay's end, some 40 pages later, that banal tiredness has taken on familial, erotic, political, and cultural dimensions. He describes a world slowed down, paid attention to, much as it might appear in a drug-induced state. Paragraphs stretch five pages or longer, contributing to the tedium. The final essay, ``The Successful Day,'' is also based on the mundane. Throwing an experience common to his audience back in their faces, he forces chuckles and all-out laughter as digressions become avoidances. Both these essays take the form of mock interviews, permitting him to play devil's advocate with himself. The longer title essay is harder to follow. His physical landscape is unfamiliar, and in constant flux. His subject is boredom itself: Staying in an insipid small town, the writer puts off sitting down at his desk by aimlessly searching for a jukebox like the one that filled his childhood. The joke here, of course, is that Handke is writing all this, accomplishing something the reader is not. This volume is a philosophical exercise by a mind taking multiple detours. Readers who lack the author's deadpan humor will stare blank-eyed at the page. They can't win. Handke has them precisely where he wants them. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Once the enfant terrible of German literature, the Austrian-born Handke has now become one of its acknowledged masters, widely praised for his attempts to create serious literature (as opposed to entertainment), his ability to convey his finely nuanced perceptions, and his efforts to overcome the limitations of traditional genre by experimenting with their forms. All these qualities are evinced in the three essays gathered here ("The Jukebox," "Tiredness," and "The Successful Day"). The title essay is more accurately about the writer's creative processes as he approaches the writing of an essay on the jukebox. "Tiredness" is a dialog between the writer and an unidentified interlocutor that uses the concept of tiredness to investigate community and alienation, among other things, and "The Successful Day," similar in form to the preceding essay, seeks meaning, beauty, and grace in the individual life. A necessary addition to any collection of Handke's work.
Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.