Book Review: ‘The Fruit Thief’ by Peter Handke

At this point in the review, the reader is perfectly justified in demanding an answer to a key question: What’s the story? Well, this is the story of two halves, or rather two different stages of unequal length. (There is no end of the chapter, although Handke at least lets us pause to breathe between paragraphs, unlike his more anti-human compatriot Thomas Bernhard.) As the novel begins, a writer like Handke, who lives in a village outside of Paris, arrives on an August it sets off. throughout the capital and the Picardy region in the afternoon. While observing his surroundings as he leaves, he occasionally mentions a young woman whom he calls “the fruit thief” and who seems to have embarked on a similar journey to the northern provinces of the country. This “fruit thief” – we’ll learn later that her name is Alexia – seems to be the mental image of the protagonist in a novel she originally planned to write, or rather, is is writing. It turns out that he wrote his own path as he traced his real or imagined steps in the interior of France. into it and thus brings the novel into existence. In short, Handke not only gives us the story, but also the imagination of the story and the circumstances in which it unfolds, as was fashionable in Milan Kundera and the days of literary postmodernism.

France, through which the narrator travels, is one of the recent past that is still in shock after the jihadist atrocities – a nation at war, but a country “silent and paralyzed by terrorism.” As his train leaves Paris, a voice startles the narrator and the other passengers: “Fear was in our bones. … If nothing else, now we contemporaries had one thing in common.”

I would have gotten along better with this book if Handke had continued the first-person narrative, dispelling the fictional arrogance in favor of something akin to the 1996 Serbian travelogue “Journey to the Rivers.” Handke called it “my narrative expeditions or solo expeditions” in his Nobel Prize speech. However, by 75 pages, a one-way change occurs: Suddenly the traveler no longer thinks intermittently of Alexia, but removes himself from the stage to tell her story. The imaginary limb pain of waiting for us to return to the “I” perspective turns into acknowledging that we’re stuck in Alexia for the rest of the time. Fresh from an impromptu trip to Siberia, a young woman wanders Picardy in search of her mother. Although it’s a low-voltage variety (dancing with an innkeeper, some dialogue with a gloomy boy named Valter, etc.), frankly, it’s hard going.

Handke, an avant-garde hottie brand in the 1960s, wrote an “anti-game” titled “Offending the Audience,” but now his strategy has come dangerously close to Tearing the Audience to Tears. I have tried to envision a subset of readers who find these things really enjoyable, such as the narrator imagining the fruit thief character. It lacks most of the elements that draw people to fiction – insight, suspense, etc. – it falls to either language or the narrative material itself to make the novel worth the reader’s time. While both have their moments – a frenzied talk in the last pages, a break in an inn that takes the light and atmosphere of old European folk tales – the food this highly eccentric novelist serves is plentiful and without salt, wine and wine. no dessert. I suspect that an uncompromising writer like Peter Handke is destined to write primarily for a one-person audience. Perhaps its most devoted readers adopt a respectful, quiet, serious, and more or less bored attitude, similar to the way many people attend mass.