On inconveniently alive writers

Today I started reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, after glaring at it on my bookshelf for the past 3 weeks. I had begun the Rings of Saturn (on the recommendation of Aimee Bender) a few years ago, but had put it down. Too dense. I just didn’t like it.

“How can you not like Sebald?” several writers have asked me with complete incredulity.  “You love German, speak German, admire German art, and love German literature!”   

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? – was the unspoken question.

“He’s so brilliant.”

“And how sad that he’s dead.”

Interestingly, I had a similar set of conversations about Bolaño’s SAVAGE DETECTIVES two years ago.

“I just can’t get through it,” I told someone. “There are all those prostitutes talking about philosophy and politics, and I don’t mind prostitutes talking philosophy, but I want them to sound at least a little like real people or else sound like the characters in Sade.”

Heads shook at this.

“How can you not like Bolaño…. he’s all about metafiction, the postmodern, magical realism.”  Etc etc.

“Well, I read Nazi Literature of the Americas and I love that, and I love a Distant Star.”

“But 2066!  His death was such a tragedy.”

Etc etc.

Dead authors are great. Their corpus is complete, and they can’t change on you or quick write something unexpected. They are under your control, and you can safely idolize them even if you aren’t sure (as in the case of Bolaño) what their actual life story was.

But anyway, back to Sebald.

So there I was reading the first of the 4 “biographies’ in The Emigrants.  And as I was reading I kept on repeating one word over and over and over again.

“handke handke handke handke”

“He sounds like a poor man’s Peter Handke,” I shouted – to the dismay of my husband and daughter, who were both trying to update their own blogs.

Peter Handke is a bothersome – if not downright pain in the ass -- authorial hombre.

1. He is alive and kicking while these other authors are dead.
2. He’s a problem because his aesthetic has changed remarkably at least twice
3.  He went To Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral and said something nice about him.
4. He has made pro Serbian remarks and comments.

I admit -- I groaned audibly when I read about 3 and 4. 

(Although it’s typical: he’s the one who had the audience locked into the theater during the first performance of “Insulting the Audience.”  I wouldn’t put it past him to go to Milosevic’s funeral BECAUSE people begged him not to.)

Because of these 4 items, no one reads Handke in this country. No academic critics write about him, and I have to admit, I don’t like his new books so much, and haven’t read the most recent one.

BUT.

The fact remains that Peter Handke is a genius.  He singlehandedly (with a bit of help from the more respected Thomas Bernhard [dead!!!!] and Patrick Susskind) has just about reinvented how German narrative can work, and how spare the German language can be, when you compress it enough.  He has written breathtakingly weird, funny, heartbreaking novels and a hybrid memoir/biography about him and his mother that still is one of the most earth shattering reads you can have. 

He wrote the play Kaspar – still performed and valued. 

And in the 80’s he correctly identified the challenge of the writer to outstrip the acts of commodification – having to wake up every morning and think of a way to beat out the flattening of art by commercial television and publicity tactics.

And by the way, Sebald LOVED Peter Handke (aha!  I knew it!), and wrote on him extensively. 

So, clearly, this famous dead author was deeply influenced by this weird, unpleasant, and inconveniently still very much alive writer.

Keep em coming, Mr. Handke, and I promise I’ll try to read your latest book now.

P.S. -- This Christmas as you order the unreadable Rings of Saturn, consider putting some of the following into your shopping cart:

Short Letter, Long Farewell

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Across

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Kaspar and other plays

The Afternoon of the Writer

A Moment of True Feeling

Children’s Story

The Weight of the World

The Jukebox

pps -- to read a high-culture take on PH as I rock the postmodern vocab of the feminist literary critic, check out my dense "essay" on Handke's essays in Postmodern Culture: On the Bull's Horn with Peter Handke