[In the following review, Skwara offers a positive assessment of Versuch über die Müdigkeit.]

What a wise and beautiful book, quite possibly one of Peter Handke's major works. Did we, the tired ones, ever know or suspect how much variety and wealth there is to being tired, how much power of innovation is hiding behind fatigue? We will find out and come out of it rejuvenated, or at least reconciled and comforted with our frailties. Versuch über die Müdigkeit is an essay—or is it a story, or mere poetry?—that we want to read slowly, frightened as we progress about the book’s small size, since we do not wish to come to the end. Naturally, there is the liberty to read again, to return often to these pages, and I suspect we will.

What then sets the work apart from others Handke (see WLT 62:1, pp. 74–75, and 55:4, pp. 203–7) has written in recent years? As is often the case, the text is built on memory. Handke goes back to his childhood, and soon the Du of an inner dialogue between the writer and the remembered child and adolescent takes over, giving the prose the solemn tone that many Handke readers deplore. Nevertheless, it is the right tone for the voice of the poet detecting festivity in what we like to call—wrongfully—our everyday life. There is no such thing, Handke informs us, and tiredness does not exist either. To be sure, there is fatigue, surrounding and filling us like the atmosphere, but also invigorating us like the oxygen contained in that atmosphere: fatigue as a universe in itself, a stronghold of weakness that invites the poet to name its lands, its provinces and hidden valleys. Handke does just that: he teaches us the ways of tiredness and how much one must have lived and how tired one must be in order to find these proper names. It is no exaggeration to assume that his Versuch adds to the German language a wealth of new images and thus opportunities to express what formerly was unspeakable. For this alone the reader will be grateful to Handke, who speaks precisely of the “bildhafte Müdigkeiten” he sees expressed in simple people but denies to the “Bürger.”

When, halfway through the book, the reader becomes “müdstolz,” when, in the passage on erotic tiredness, Handke describes fatigue as the very condition of touching and being close to one another, then the essay leaves the literary realm and turns into a metaphysical exercise. Handke tells us about the four ways of his “Sprach-Ich” in facing the world, and the reader becomes the delighted observer of growing oneness between language and poet.

Does utmost fatigue permit us action? Handke asks. In reply he finds that being tired is the best possible action in itself. His wonderful essay was written during a stay in southern Spain, and Latin clarity combines with German complexity to form the text. Fatigue, we learn, is foremost a teacher, and Versuch über die Müdigkeit, I would say, is above all a friend.