Romantic Teuton

...A line was crossed that has thrown the world into the negative...

...Various characters from reporters and journalists to stonemasons and hotel clerks grab the narrative limelight...

...And suspicion is apt to grow into hostility if you begin to believe that the powers that be are relying upon a dictatorial “discursive regime” to bound debate and channel perceptions...

...Plus, by hiring an author to write the book for her, both the woman banker and the author can address the reader directly and thereby gum up the narrative drive in an exquisitely postmodernist fashion...

...Which brings us to Crossing the Sierra de Gredos...

...He once stated that his “primary literary intent is the destruction of predetermined systems and concepts of reality...

...Everybody says Sept...

...The seductions of a mediadominated mass culture have attained hegemony...

...That would be too simple...

...We learn, inter alia, that she was born in eastern Germany into a SerbianArab family...

...As the protagonist explains, the images just turn up randomly to protect her: “Poof...

...She had to reveal what she knew...

...Postmodernist writers are nothing if not shameless about ripping off the ideas of their precursors...

...What is it about...

...In retrospect, Handke’s political radicalization was all but complete by the end of the 1980s, a decade in which he delved into Heidegger and emerged ever more committed to demonstrating how language systems distort perception and how Reason is a mechanism of social repression...

...How long...

...Nobody knows that on March 24, 1999, in the middle of Europe, an independent, sovereign State was attacked by awful bombs without any law, where such and such number of people—let’s not quibble over numbers—civilians, children died for nothing and nothing...

...And so when it does, the reader knows not to worry about it...

...BY MICHAEL MCDONALD If you’ve been tapping your foot impatiently for the next “great” postmodernist novel—hierarchies being bad, the quote marks are de rigueur—brace yourself: The wait is over...

...Many, myself included, also fi nd his slim memoir of the life and suicide of his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), to be a minor masterpiece...

...Handke scatters countless details throughout the book about the woman banker...

...Does it matter...

...For two...

...These shitty Europeans who today want nothing but money and disco and video and Internet, they should learn: What happened on March 24, 1999...

...For there she discovers “a tribe” of refugees that the rest of the world is about to wage war with...

...And so she has signed a contract with an author living in La Mancha, “to write a book about her undertakings and her adventures”— which, of course, turns out to be the book in the reader’s hands...

...But one would be wrong to view Handke’s novel as little more than a postmodernist reworking of scenes in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Cervantes...

...Some of the great writers of the last century may have been journalists— Hemingway, Orwell, Koestler, Silone—but to Handke, reporting is nothing other than a swindle...

...Think of a blending of Joycean “epiphanies” and Proust’s notion of “involuntary memory...

...The diminutive library along the city wall of Avila . . . ” And so on...

...There is a political edge to the tale which becomes clearer as the heroine makes her way to the Sierra de Gredos...

...What happened...

...11 is a magic date,” Handke has declared: And I say: And what happened on March 24...

...They have made a deliberate choice to be separate...

...As a result, the rest of the world now seems intent on wiping the enclave “off the face of the earth...

...Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD may be familiar with Handke from his public engagements during and following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia...

...The moment had come to tell the world...

...Handke has a keen ear for exposing the clich?s that cloud people’s thinking...

...But if she had, one would have to construct the word “book-loss” to describe the precious little that remained...

...And at each such location, new cartoon characters are introduced to recite half-baked stories...

...Oh, and by the way, in her youth she starred in a fi lm set in the Middle Ages...

...Hence, one assumes, its elimination from the English title...

...Charitably considered, the novel is something of a picaresque questing tale...

...War will soon be declared, disguised as “peace operations” or perhaps as “love action...

...How she had pioneered a new way of life is never clearly stated...

...We are also told that the woman banker has many enemies as a result of her work as a “world champion of global fi nance” (again set off in quotes in the book to demonstrate yet another journalistic clich...

...But it seems to have something to do with her ability to receive powerful, unmediated images of places she has visited that protect her from the usual cant one fi nds in society, and provide her with a powerful sense of being alive...

...that she has a daughter who has disappeared...

...As the woman banker’s quest continues, she travels through mountains and towns, village fairs, and hotels, all described in a fl at, fi lm-treatment way that makes each scene seem like a onedimensional Potemkin construction lacking depth...

...The woman banker, who goes by a number of different designations—the heroine, the adventurer, Odysseus in the shape of a woman—lives in what we are repeatedly told is “a transitional period” at some vague point in the not-too-distant future when the fi rst manned spacecraft has landed on Mars and everyone speaks a single language, also unnamed, although my guess is that it can only be that most linear and conformity-inducing of tongues, English...

...Days...

...Handke damned the NATO bombing campaign to end Serbian ethnic cleansing, damned the trials of Serbian war criminals in the Hague, and damned what he termed the “Fourth Reich” of Western journalists who reported on such things as Serbian ethnic cleansing and Serbian war criminals...

...The title of a 1967 essay, “Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms” (“I Live in an Ivory Tower”) seemed to say it all...

...Krishna Winston was undoubtedly right in dropping Bildverlust from the English title...

...For example, the protagonist can explicitly tell the author (and us): “Do not be afraid to let something contradictory appear now and then in these pages...

...A deserted sandy playground by a canal in Ghent . . . Poof...

...But she is “never afraid of anything...

...In this regard, undoubtedly the two most important things we learn about the woman banker are, fi rst, that “what she was aiming for was a sense of life independent of society and all systems” and, second, that “she had been one of the pioneers of new ways of life...

...But if your starting point is that human language is incapable of portraying reality truthfully, you will be suspicious, to say the least, of those who believe otherwise...

...Bildverlust, as Mark Twain noted in his famous essay “The Awful German Language,” is one of those “compound words constructed by the [German] writer on the spot and not to be found in any dictionary...

...And so the purpose of the journey is to replenish her stock of images...

...While in his twenties, Handke proudly proclaimed that he wanted nothing to do with politics...

...For hours...

...These people are refugees from all over the world...

...From the start of his career in the 1960s, Handke has been seen as one of the most important German-speaking writers active today...

...You might think having two narrators was confusing enough...

...But there’s always room for more...

...Now in his mid-sixties, he has received every important German-language literary prize...

...In the rest of the world the types of images that she is living off are dying out—so much so that it has become a “problem of epochal proportions...

...They have had it with the fl ashy, corrupting images they have been fed and they have decided to go it alone...

...Do the details of the heroine’s life ever coalesce to form a convincing, fully imagined character...

...The book is Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the author is the Austrian writer Peter Handke, and midwife to the enterprise is Krishna Winston, who translated the novel, which appeared in German in 2002 as Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos...

...And you will not be surprised to learn that they have constructed a true Marxist utopia where “the brutal distinction between sinister winners and wretched losers” no longer obtains...

...Handke himself also feels the need to intrude now and then, over both of their heads, addressing the Reader directly as “Dear Reader” or inserting small rants and then concluding with “End of Message...

...It doesn’t matter...

...Indeed, when in 2004 the S?ddeutsche Zeitung published a list of the 50 greatest German novels of the 20th century, an early Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), was on it...

...Over the years she had often felt the urge to spread the word of her remarkable and memorable encounters with the shooting images, or image showers...

...The protagonist, an unnamed female banker who lives on the outskirts of a great, unnamed northwestern river port city in Europe, has decided to undertake a journey to the Sierra de Gredos mountains in Spain...

...It’s a concept central to Handke’s concerns here, but a word guaranteed to leave the prospective book buyer nonplussed...

...Well, any kind...

...Praise he reserved for Slobodan Milosevic—“a man who defended his people”—at whose funeral Handke spoke in 2006...

...And why not, if it helps one to understand how Handke thinks writing is a fraud...

...Thrown into the mix are his usual animadversions against clich?s—some of which, for example, when he attacks expressions such as “without a doubt” (when there should be doubt) or the word “dialogue” which the protagonist hears “constantly crackl[ing] from all channels,” are not half bad...

...Fortunately for humanity, the protagonist is an altruist...

...That should be written in neon letters above Europe...

...She stayed in Hondareda...

...What happened on March 24, 1999...

...Throughout the 1990s, Handke added his voice to those on the hard left who maintained that Europe and America had contrived the “so-called humanitarian intervention” in the Balkans for the benefi t of Western bankers...

...Well, yes and no...

...In other words, out with linear plots, mimetic narrative and a concern with social insights into human nature, and in with the irrationality of human consciousness, the instability of language, and a relentless focus on the act of writing itself...

...And for the sin of trying to disentangle themselves from power’s omnivorous maw—from the totally administered world Theodor Adorno warned us about—to engage in their alternative cultural practices, the refugees face war which, just as in the Balkans, will be waged under the guise of “human rights...

...It means something like “image-loss...

...Needless to say, this group has aroused worldwide indignation with its new “existential experiment...

...For a half day...

...that she has a brother who was imprisoned as a “terrorist” (quote marks, in the original, meant to highlight the arrant nonsense of such a designation...

...But then, as usual, he goes over the precipice by inveighing against historians who issue books in “the carefully cultivated tone of historical objectivity” and journalists who believe “eyewitness accounts” and think that “reporting” means that events can happen only “this way and no other way...

...Handke’s early novels and plays tend to be slimmed-down, angst-ridden, and highly experimental affairs...

...What kinds of images...

...The protagonist, as well as all the characters she encounters in her journey, exists merely as a mouthpiece for his worldview...

...The author in La Mancha can then write sentences such as these: “She climbed down, down, down, for an hour...

...But the considerable reputation Handke commands has less to do with politics than with his undeniable talent as a writer...

...Would that she could have also eliminated the many slack, graceless, and meandering sentences that comprise this bloated tome...

...But as if to prove, yet again, the time-honored truth that progressive politics makes for poor art, Handke’s avid embrace of postmodernist “textual politics” caused his writing to suffer as he abandoned what little storytelling impulse he had previously displayed and began to churn out disorienting meta-fi ctions designed to focus his readers’ attention on objects themselves rather than one’s preconceived notions of them...

...Why not just write the book herself...

...But however metaphysically sound such ruminations may be from a Heideggerian Being-in-the-World perspective, one thing is equally clear: Boy, are they boring...

...And when he’s in form, his ability to describe nature scenes is such that it has reminded many a Continental critic of the magnifi cent landscape scenes limned in classic German prose by the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter...

...Many of the protective images seem to be the product of her visits to the Sierra de Gredos...

...Not to Handke...

...Every evening . . . What happened...

...In sum, Handke has surpassed himself, having written a Chomskyite fairy tale for the remnants of the pro-Milosevic left...