THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

by Peter Handke ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 1984

At first glance, these journal entries from German novelist Handke's two-year stay in Paris (1975-1977) seem so prosaic or numb or sybilline as to approach parody: ""Someone drops something. The people at the next table look around, but only for a second."" Or: ""A gentleman wants to be alone. (Already there's no one in the room.) He rings for his servant and says in response to the knock: 'Don't come in.' At last he is alone."" Or: ""Suddenly, in the midst of all the people who crowded around me or spoke to me, I felt as if there were a dead chicken in my chest."" But soon a few themes do develop--especially Handke's stressful relationship as a single parent with his daughter A., who lives with him. Then a series of terrible panic attacks crescendo into a stay in a hospital ICU for chest pains. And, released from the hospital (but not from his own consuming fright), Handke begins making notations that are very close-in, self-scouring. ""Explicit stupidity may, after all, be a proof of existence: with its undissembled inadequacy, it shows a need for manifest itself, to be present, to join in the game; stupidity as expression of an affliction that does not yet know itself--perhaps if one were to shoo it gently away from the affected person, one would discover a long sorrow."" Dour, ingrown jottings, without Kafka-esque fierceness and eloquence; but, as a study in pervasive anxiety (and the willed cultivation of silence in hopes of remedy), they are no less involving--and perhaps more so--than the similarly etiolated configurations of Handke's novels.

Pub Date: July 9, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION