The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Once Again for Thucydides and My Year in the No-Man's-Bay by Peter Handke
Matthew Badura

Peter Handke. Once Again for Thucydides. Trans. Tess Lewis. New Directions, 1998. 90 pp. $18.95; My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay. Trans. Krishna Winston. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 467 pp. $30.00.

In Once Again for Thucydides, Peter Handke—the renowned Austrian novelist, dramatist, and man of letters—extends the tradition of his Greek forebear admirably. In “The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich,” the longest and, perhaps, most revealing of the seventeen “micro-epics” contained in Handke’s idiosyncratic new collection, a narrator says, “Hadn’t I always felt alienated or even repulsed when other writers used their sense of imagery in this way . . . parading their mystical gift for an omnipresence that could always transform a modern ruin into an ancient temple.” Although Handke playfully resists the transformative nature of imagery, his prose finds images of passing hats, a snowfall, a shoeshine man, an ash tree, or a glowworm becoming elements of the narrator’s moment-by-moment existence and, as such, transforming the narrator’s understanding of his being and times. For example, in “Sheet-Lightning Epopee or Once Again for Thucydides,” the narrator is literally guided by flares of sheet lightning in the sky to the literal and mythic wonders of the Pleiades, while “Attempt to Exorcise One Story with Another” finds the narrator watching as the touch of a small blue butterfly releases the screams of children persecuted during World War II, “almost a half century after their deportation, but only now as they should.” These images also evoke echoes of history—both natural and anthropocentric—allowing Handke to open a symbolic gateway through which he examines and finds himself implicated with the wisdom and atrocities of the past. In Once Again for Thucydides, Handke presents us with a truly (re)visionary history.

Thucydides has been critiqued by Ford Madox Ford for allowing his philosophical musings to curtail the immediacy and visionary power of his writing. Appropriately, such criticism could also be directed toward Handke’s new novel, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay. Although the novel contains passages of wondrous prose (particularly in part 3), the novel—with its painfully contorted trajectory and didactic tendencies—will reward only the most patient and forgiving of readers. For those unfamiliar with Handke’s work, Once Again for Thucydides is a much more accessible and engaging introduction to this vital international voice. [Matthew Badura]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Once Again for Thucydides and My Year in the No-Man's-Bay by Peter Handke Matthew Badura Peter Handke. Once Again for Thucydides. Trans. Tess Lewis. New Directions, 1998. 90 pp. $18.95; My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay. Trans. Krishna Winston. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 467 pp. $30.00. In Once Again for Thucydides, Peter Handke—the renowned Austrian novelist, dramatist, and man of letters—extends the tradition of his Greek forebear admirably. In “The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich,” the longest and, perhaps, most revealing of the seventeen “micro-epics” contained in Handke’s idiosyncratic new collection, a narrator says, “Hadn’t I always felt alienated or even repulsed when other writers used their sense of imagery in this way . . . parading their mystical gift for an omnipresence that could always transform a modern ruin into an ancient temple.” Although Handke playfully resists the transformative nature of imagery, his prose finds images of passing hats, a snowfall, a shoeshine man, an ash tree, or a glowworm becoming elements of the narrator’s moment-by-moment existence and, as such, transforming the narrator’s understanding of his being and times. For example, in “Sheet-Lightning Epopee or Once Again for Thucydides,” the narrator is literally guided by flares of sheet lightning in the sky to the literal and mythic wonders of the Pleiades, while “Attempt to Exorcise One Story with Another” finds the narrator watching as the touch of a small blue butterfly releases the screams of children persecuted during World War II, “almost a half century after their deportation, but only now as they should.” These images also evoke echoes of history—both natural and anthropocentric—allowing Handke to open a symbolic gateway through which he examines and finds himself implicated with the wisdom and atrocities of the past. In Once Again for Thucydides, Handke presents us with a truly (re)visionary history. Thucydides has been critiqued by Ford Madox Ford for allowing his philosophical musings to curtail the immediacy and visionary power of his writing. Appropriately, such criticism could also be directed toward Handke’s new novel, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay. Although the novel contains passages of wondrous prose (particularly in part 3), the novel—with its painfully contorted trajectory and didactic tendencies—will reward only the most patient and forgiving of readers. For those unfamiliar with Handke’s work, Once Again for Thucydides is a much more accessible and engaging introduction to this vital international voice. [Matthew Badura]

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