Drizzle, Birdcall, Leaf Fall

When the Seine leaves Paris for the Channel, it makes several large loops while being forced by physics to skirt high ground. The first of these “bays” contains the hills of the Seine, low waves across a crescent-shaped region upon which the suburbs have intruded, but where large forests still remain, and also an area that shelters an airfield frequently bombed during World War II, so that craters can be seen on its many wooded walks. La Hauts-de-Seine halfmoons a landscape that is historically layered, in touch with the city but almost country in character, neither entirely one thing nor the other, a condition that makes it attractive to this geographical novel, in which flora and fauna, climate and terrain, are traits like those ascribed normally to fictional creatures and are the environments that the narrator walks through, either by himself or in the guise of friends who become his surrogate travelers.

In this bay, an area withdrawn from the whole, the narrator has marooned himself, and his journeys are confined to rambles that the onset of suburbanism has reduced and circumscribed. They take place over a terrain where any hill higher than a building becomes a mountain, but a mountain nevertheless so puny it fails to roughen the map: a no man’s land where he--from January to December of 1993--will make his home and write this meditation on voyages once taken or presently imagined or repeatedly dreamed.

A nomad is one who carries his home along with him on his journeys, but there is another sort of wanderer depicted here: a writer who lives in fear of definition, of being fastened by a formula of words, of being pinned down at one stage of his development, always at risk of inadvertently acquiring roots, losing his detachment and therefore the distance he believes is essential to the practice of his art, distance that is sometimes described as the space behind a mirror. He is searching for points of vantage from which to glance at, rather than scrutinize, the world, an angle from which he may take in the rest, as if it were being seen out of the corner of his eye, because sidelong glances (a repeated motif) suggest that the observer does not wish to be included in the scene, is in the wings, off stage, not even a gent with flowers waiting for the diva in her dressing room.

The narrator’s first name is Gregor, a name borrowed from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and his last name is Keuschnig, the K coming from “The Castle,” with the additional suggestion of purity through the meaning of keusch, which includes just a hint of virginity. There is an inviting but treacherous resemblance between PeterHandke’s circumstances as we know them from news reports and books, and the novel-writing persona of the book he writes--not, of course, to him, a novel rather a meditation, a journal, a travelogue, an interrogation, an activity that becomes simply unaimed writing, unaimed in order that something fundamental may be struck. About time, too, for this is a millennial novel. Characters from other books will show up briefly; periods from the author’s career, scarcely disguised, will float like loosened leaves across the steady stream of this prose; difficulties wrestled with through several decades of public pronouncement, will be confronted again, especially thoughts preconceived and jotted down in a journal written in the ‘70s during Handke’s first “Paris period” (like the narrator’s own earlier sojourn near the city) and published in English as “The Weight of the World.”

“The feeling that almost everything I have seen or heard up to now loses its original form the moment it enters into me, that it can no longer be directly described in words or represented in images, but is instantly metamorphosed into something quite formless; as though the effort of my writing were needed to change the innumerable formless pupae inside me into something essentially different . . . and to fashion them into something radiantly new, in which, however, one senses the old, the original experience, as one senses the caterpillar in the butterfly!”

In this book, the anticipated metamorphosis will happen to Gregor Keuschnig himself, a name that seems strange for a reader to write or to say, it occurs so rarely. In these many rich pages, which we have to imagine in their original German (here transformed beautifully by Krishna Winston’s translation) dotted with ich-es instead of Is: ich . . . ich . . . ich . . . ich . . . I walked, thought, felt, saw, remembered, imagined, feared, sought . . . ich . . . ich . . . ich . . . like footsteps on sodden ground.

For a second time, the narrator retires to a Paris suburb, but on this occasion in order to encounter a self he feels may be emerging, to listen for the sound of his fundamental voice, to freshen his vision, to concentrate upon the Earth and his relation to it, to sit still and see--out of the corner of his eye--the wealth of the world in the cheapened metal of a local coin. He is to be, as Handke again writes about himself in “The Weight of the World,” “. . . the private detective, with no need to notice anything in particular, but authorized to notice everything, the starting of last cars, the tenants talking as if already asleep. . . the sound of tearing Scotch tape; dot-like sounds in the vines on the garden wall. . . .”

At first his plan is to position himself by a single window and from that vantage point, improved by a bit of pruning, to perceive whatever odor, object, racket passes in the street, stirs the leaves, moves in the gardens below him. Weary at last of his self-absorption, his wife departs, returning occasionally to bedevil him like a bad conscience, actually lifting him, during one show of anger, like Antaeus from the ground, just as a fellow author has previously done. Keuschnig is in fact felt to represent, even to embody, the culture of a small country, as Peter Handke is required to be Austrian by many of his countrymen. They urge him to return from the odd wide world to his humble village beginnings, and to drink as before from the town pump, quaff a dipper once more with the boys, visit in their pub, listen to and learn from their native voice; however, that kind of local connection will, Keuschnig believes, deprive him of the strength he feels when he is able to escape such narrow and parochial relations, when he stands instead on foreign ground, as an altered self, and from that vantage can rescue from the obscurity of their neglectful familiarity the simple sensuous qualities that would make up life if such qualities were allowed to be themselves--cellophane tape tearing, coins shifting in a trouser pocket--and, so equipped with their realization, he could endeavor to answer the novel’s first question, put more than once: “Who can say, after all, that the world has already been discovered?” Or possibly its second: Is there anything or anyone with which one may appropriately identify?

We ought to know best our place of birth, but home is where the hardened heart is. The cliche tells us we are fed through our roots, that we are consequently plants, and that our accomplishments crown us as trees are crowned by spreading limbs and shading leaves and plentiful fruits. If our soul aspires to more motion than a plant’s, it should remember that the animal (who locomotes) has its tiny territory, its habitat, repetitive paths: familiar thicket, meadow, grove or stream. Yet the human soul imagines--places, times, scenes, feelings, thoughts that go far from its growth and hunting grounds, which it then marches toward and remains on ardent watch for, just as this novel, in the meditative tradition of fellow Austrians, Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard, marks and looks and listens, broods and ponders on the so-called small, the so-called habitual things of this world: drizzle, birdcall, leaf fall.

“The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time.”

If one is to see the world in a grain of sand, one must first see the sand.

“I sat with my suitcase in an outdoor cafe by the Gare de l’Est, the asphalt at my feet showing the innumerable overlapping imprints of bottle caps from the hot times of year. . . .”

And understand how patinas are variously made: by additions sometimes or by subtractions, while being similarly shaped:

“[T]he trains whizzed through [a concrete cut] as if already out in the open countryside, and the air current they created always buffeted the luxuriant vegetation that hung down over the steep walls. . . . Time and again the vegetation was removed, and then, before new vegetation maybe took its place, a pattern of rough semicircles was revealed on the wall, often layered on top of each other, light patches scratched and etched in the concrete by all the bunches, fans, trailing streamers as they brushed back and forth.”

Keuschnig’s son proceeds his mother in departure--tacitly agreeing with cliche--to search for his father, not at the sill of his father’s sightseeing, but on the Slavic home grounds where his father was himself once someone’s son.

Solitude, in this book, is a happy circumstance. The narrator begins to breathe, breathe words. But when he does, his mind takes flight. Through the agency of a friend, an architect who discovered a carpenter sawing away. Inside himself, he visits Japan and builds with another’s hands symbolic huts; using the limbs of a singer, he hikes in the Scottish Highlands, just as, with a painter, now filmmaker, he trudges over Catalonia. In the company of a willful former beauty and still longed-for lover, he explores coastal Turkey, and by means of his local priest does a round of visits in his native village. His son is in Yugoslavia where his father’s thoughts nose after him. Finally a nameless reader--bluntly named “Reader”--who is following, like a demented or faithful fan, the narrator’s authorial footsteps on a former trip through Germany, has his own feet observed as they stand in the tracks of that trail, marked and matched by the omniscient eye of the writer who first made them.

One ought to read this book the way one reads “Walden,” although the region in which it is set is not entirely unoccupied or wholly woodsy. It is, like “Walden,” the record of a single eye, a solitary soul and a lonely mind. What its remarkable, evenly toned though complex prose creates is a consciousness, a consciousness that will take in people occasionally, but much as it takes in a backyard bush, a consciousness that can sit in one place, its body’s back comfortably against a stump, to do nothing there but observe (and assemble sentences), because it has become a lichen on the stump itself and can consequently appreciate the way a turtle crosses a stillness, a muskrat sizes things up, a lizard passes weakly out of its slow life, or how the demonic energy in a sudden swarm of bees electrifies the sky, or why the softness of some doves disarms, or the shadows, like those from fire, of a few fish, fool the fisherman, or the reason the silhouette of the eagle signals the future path of its prey, or why the ripple of a water snake is the double of itself, why twilight bursts with bats.

Or why the sudden appearance of glorious mushrooms--king boletus--in the ruts of repeated cyclists, resembles the rise of something supremely fine, something worth sharing, from anyone’s earth, from the rot and dreary conclusion of a hidden life.

The reader should hang over this tent like a lover postponing the pleasure of full lips. The Reader, as the reader is called here, should be prepared to enter and reside in the province of a mind made powerful by solitude, a mind inventively and energetically cleared for development, dramatization and intensification, as Handke describes it, free of preconception; a mind that has held its torn-up roots in front of its eyes and watched the earth there dry to a dust that any forceful bit of breath may blow away: all in order to realize an epic unlike other epics, those histories which are always lamely over before they’ve begun, and instead to render “the epic tale of tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? It is gradually disclosed to us that this book was written during a single year, 1993 (Handke tells us by posting dates on the last page). Yet it is set in 1999--a year said by Handke to be one of civil war throughout the world, especially in Germany, and therefore a good year to retire to some no-man’s bay where one may freely sail and safely land. But the war, because it is a civil one, is a struggle against traditional ties by those customarily tied. It is fought by parrots, pairs of shoes, purses. Against their cages, their mates, their money. By the accouterments of rituals that rise up against the ceremony. By rain allowed only asphalt to fall upon.

Disconnection can scarcely be carried further. Friends need to be freed of friendship in order to become friends again. While the narrator is forming an attachment to a small boy he has by chance toddler-watched and is happy about feeling fatherly for the first time, his own son is in Yugoslavia dumping him off his back. That woman friend in Turkey, who went about hunting for talismans that would tell her of her fate (but, when removed from the site of their discovery, lost their charm the way colored pebbles or seashells do when, dry, they find they’ve been poured in a dull heap upon a kitchen table in the glare of kitchen light), had to learn to see the things of the world without their signs and her imputed portents. Artists had to leave their art, as one leaves someone beloved with regret and anger, in order to return and begin again. This author himself ultimately must. The Reader, deprived of books by the quixotic act of tilting at a line of cars, so that authorities quite predictably led him away to the pokey, ponders what reading really means. And then all head back to the bay from whence they were, on their wanderjahr, sent.

Having escaped from their cage into chaos (and it is only custom that describes chaos as frantic and noisy), objects, qualities, actions, relations even, find themselves free from one another, just as human beings may be, and can allow themselves at last to choose and be chosen instead of to be born and bound. For this narrator and this novel, a true place or a true country of connection--a no man’s land--occurs only through the mediation of a meditating mind, a mind bent over to inspect and to respond, to let things have their silent say. In short, place is a page.

Toward its close--although like all great books, “My Year” has no ending (“The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope”), the narrator addresses his tools, the implements he has used to record--or rather to transform--his year.

“So many pencils have I used up in this one year that the drawer is already having trouble closing from all the stubs stuffed into it, and from each I have taken leave, on another sheet of paper, in writing: ‘Thank you, Spanish pencil! Thank you, Yugoslavian pencil! Thank you, white pencil from the honeymoon hotel in Nara, Japan! Thank you, twenty-second black Cumberland pencil! Thank you, pencil from Freilassing in Germany, even if that is perhaps not a beautiful place! Thank you, pencil from the bookstore in the bay, even if your lead kept breaking during sharpening!’ ”

This reader wants to thank them too.