Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Handke, Peter (Vol. 135) - John Leonard (review date 4 December 1989)


Handke, Peter (Vol. 135) - John Leonard (review date 4 December 1989)

John Leonard (review date 4 December 1989)

SOURCE: A review of The Afternoon of a Writer, in The Nation, December 4, 1989, pp. 694-5.

[In the following review, Leonard offers a positive assessment of The Afternoon of a Writer.]

Peter Handke's early novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and his semifictionalized memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, were both fiery gems. Since then, the Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and translator seems to me to have been painting himself into a corner and then complaining that he couldn’t move. His books got thinner and more exasperating. So what if language itself were the secret hero of listless narratives like A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman and Repetition? We’d been here before—at this impasse, in this trap—in the superior company of Kafka and Rilke and Sartre. I found myself preferring Handke's...

[The entire page is 607 words long]

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