The Review of Contemporary Fiction
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House by Peter Handke. Trans. Krishna WinstonMichael Pinker
Peter Handke. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House. Trans. Krishna Winston. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 186 pp. $23.00.
Peter Handke’s new novel envisions a panoramic dreamscape that displays a remarkable sequence of events in the life of an obscure, contentedly self-absorbed pharmacist, who owns a shop in a nondescript town lying in a suburban spandrel near present-day Salzburg. When one day an unexpected blow on the head disrupts the pharmacist’s habitual routine, this learned devotee of mushrooms takes flight, beginning a journey in which he wanders like a spellbound observer of his own life through a landscape of surreal fantasy. The ensuing narrative ostensibly records this extended trip, taken several years before the pharmacist recounts it to the writer who puts it into words and whom the pharmacist occasionally interrupts. Once detached from his everyday concerns, the pharmacist’s life opens like a tropical flower, to inhabit a realm entirely of the imagination. Upon reaching certain milestones, almost at random but with a curious logic of their own, the pharmacist’s personal mythology is newly configured and recast through the muted agency of the writer/recorder he employs. Their periodic conversations about the narrative lend an impression of ongoing revision while the composition unfolds before us. Occasionally, as their conversations in the background interrupt the narrative, the pharmacist steps out of his role to comment on, suggest an alteration to, or quibble over something the writer is conveying. Yet casting the writer as little more than an amanuensis suits the nature of their free-wheeling collaboration, as if events were being made up by the pharmacist as he went along, lending an odd resonance to the whimsically self-regarding, self-consciously numinous perspective being displayed in the tale itself. [Michael Pinker]