Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Handke, Peter (Vol. 135) - D. J. Enright (review date 14 August 1986)

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D. J. Enright (review date 14 August 1986)

SOURCE: “Special Subjects,” in The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1986, pp. 37-8.

[In the following excerpt, Enright offers an unfavorable assessment of Across.]

… The title [of Across] alludes to the novel’s leitmotif, and the subject of several expert mini-essays: the threshold. “Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me,” albeit the Austrian narrator, by name Andreas Loser, does nothing so crude as to cross, in any discernible manner, any discernible boundary.

Possibly the narrator of Handke's earlier and more animated novel, Short Letter, Long Farewell, offers the tip when he explains that, in his view, to reduce a thing to a concept is to do away with it through the act of formulation, so that one doesn’t have to experience it again; to characterize is to degrade. Thereby hangs an avant-garde theory of fiction or anti-fiction, no...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Michael Hays (essay date January 1981)
   2. June Schlueter (essay date January 1981)
   3. Bruce Cook (review date 26 August 1984)
   4. D. J. Enright (review date 14 August 1986)
   5. Linda C. DeMeritt (essay date 1987)
   6. Michael Linstead (essay date 1987)
   7. Gail Pool (review date 8 July 1988)
   8. Paul Oldfield (review date 5 August 1988)
   9. Ursula Hegi (review date 16 July 1989)
   10. Mark Kamine (review date 2-16 October 1989)
   11. John Leonard (review date 4 December 1989)
   12. John Updike (review date 25 December 1989)
   13. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Winter 1990)
   14. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Summer 1990)
   15. Ursula Hegi (review date 1 July 1990)
   16. Hugo Caviola (essay date Autumn 1990)
   17. Eva-Maria Metcalf (essay date Autumn 1990)
   18. Michael Hofmann (review date 24 May 1991)
   19. J. J. White (review date 4 October 1991)
   20. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Autumn 1992)
   21. Gitta Honegger (essay date 1993)
   22. Thomas H. Falk (review date Summer 1993)
   23. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Autumn 1993)
   24. Richard Arthur Firda (essay date 1993)
   25. Times Literary Supplement (review date 16 September 1994)
   26. Gitta Honegger (review date 1995)
   27. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Summer 1995)
   28. Edward Timms (review date 26 April 1996)
   29. Theodore Ziolkowski (review date Winter 1997)
   30. Tom Sellar (review date 1997)
   31. David Rieff (review date 12 January 1997)
   32. Theodore Ziolkowski (review date Summer 1997)
   33. Erich Wolfgang Skwara (review date Winter 1998)
   34. Thomas McGonigle (review date 20 September 1998)
   35. William H. Gass (review date 29 November 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike