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Title: My Year in the No-Man's-Bay by Peter Handke, Krishna Winston ISBN: 0-374-21755-6 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: August, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: The Tale is the Teller
Comment: Austrian novelist, playwright and screenwriter Peter Handke is someone who seeks to alienate his work from the artificiality of life; in doing so his work, itself, becomes rather alienating.

Handke first gained attention in 1966 when he denounced Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll for, as he saw it, compromising the novel by making it a vehicle for social criticism. Like many French writers, Handke believed that novelists should register conscious experiences only, and then render them as austerely as possible.

Handke is a novelist who never creates a character. Instead, he folds his characters into his prose. He never constructs a real plot. Instead, he chronicles the very plotlessness (and pointlessness) of life. Handke finally decided that writers had their own personal stories to tell rather than telling those of the characters they made up. His novel, The Afternoon of a Writer told the story of, the afternoon of a writer. No more, no less.

My Year in the No-Man's Bay is the sequel to The Afternoon of a Writer. Although many readers may find this novel's content to be less-than-stimulating, I don't think anyone could say its structure is less-than-breathtaking.

The protagonist is a fifty-five year old writer who attempts to recall a year long artistic and spiritual metamorphosis. This writer is poetically named Gregor Keuschnig, and is known only as Gregor K. (Those who are at all familiar with Handke will immediately recognize this as a jab at Kafka, one of Handke's least favorite authors.) Gregor, who is obviously Handke's alter-ego, has grown disenchanted with both city life and country life and has moved to the suburbs of Paris instead. The city and the countryside, says Gregor, have been much overused as the setting in more traditional novels.

Throughout the book, Gregor uses the French word, banlieue, for suburb. But banlieue could also mean "place of the outlaws," and, as such, it represents for Gregor, a chance to mine new linguistic and narrative terrain; a sort of "no-man's bay," a nameless body of water. (Apparently American writers who are notorious for setting their novels in the suburbs, John Updike, in particular, have escaped Handke's notice.)

Gregor first writes at length about the difficulties and problems all writers face, bringing us right up to the year of his metamorphosis in the suburbs which is what he really wants to describe in the first place. He has a very difficult time doing so, however, as he gets bogged down time and again in what he calls "prehistories."

The novel's last section, The Day, is a section in which Gregor collapses all time together. His year of metamorphosis, we come to realize, could be the year he is writing about or the year he is writing in or the year in which one of his "stories" takes place. It is up to the reader to decide.

Life, itself, intrudes on Gregor's writing abilities until his novel and his life become one and the same, inseparable. What he visualizes as being of no consequence, the stuff of novels, has become his daily world. Or, has his daily world become the stuff of his novel?

My Year in the No-Man's Bay can, at times, be a very intellectually stimulating book but, unfortunately, it is also very dry. Handke's reliance on theme over character and plot might be a good idea, but in this book, at least, it is really not believable and certainly not engrossing. At least not all of the time.

This book is certainly not all bad. Gregor's wife, Ana, despite Handke's intentions to ignore character, is particularly engrossing, as is Heraclitus, one of the novel's spirits. Unfortunately, most of My Year in the No-man's Bay is narcissistic, spiritual pretension. Handke likens both Gregor and the character of Valentin to Christ. He feels that both St. Paul and St. John are but kindred spirits and he even goes so far as to liken Gregor's metamorphosis with Christ's resurrection.

Handke co-wrote the screenplay for Wenders's Wings of Desire, a stunning movie about angels who descend to earth. In My Year in the No-Man's Bay, he seems to have taken the tremendous success of Wings of Desire a little too much too heart (although Wings deserved all the success that was heaped upon it). In this book Handke constantly make references to wings and to angels that just don't work. Unfortunately, in his desire to kill off everything that is pretentious and artificial in the novel, Handke has killed off everything that is human as well. My Year in the No-Man's Bay is still a book well worth reading, but only if a highly thematic, plotless book is one that suits your style.

I read this book in both English and in the original German. I did find the English translation to be clumsy and overly-literal. Handke always writes a gorgeous, mesmerizing German that is both winding and spare and always elegant and, if you can read German and want to read this book, the original is the far, far better choice.