Book Reviews - Review 279

(Qualifier: ages since I read this.)

A woman leaves her inadequate and sometimes abusive husband. Though she feels sorry for his distress at the break-up of their marriage, she is happier living alone, something that none of her friends can understand. Other lonely people are attracted to her, because they feel she is an "outsider" like them: but the difference is that she is content that way, and could join the human party if she felt like it.

I read this short novel for my university degree, and wasn't too impressed. The language was not very interesting, and the characterisation lacked depth. Its central question is clear enough - do we need love in our lives to be happy? - but it isn't addressed with great profundity, and the answer is a too unequivocal "No, we don't."

As with other of Handke's novels, there is a sense of this book having been written quite hastily and without much self-critical input. It seems largely a repository into which Handke throws his own perceptions as they occur to him. The lack of psychological analysis is, I think, supposed to demonstrate that the world of the mind is fundamentally mysterious, if not meaningless - but if this is the case, why write novels at all? As in Paul Auster's City of Glass, postmodernism conjures away its own purpose.

I recall one or two instances of sharp, poetic description (I have felt sometimes that Handke would make a much better poet than a novelist, though he couldn't, of course, have made a living that way). But as a narrative I felt this novel said little.