2023-10-30 02:47:12
Vienna – It is the dirge of a wandering loner with death breathing down his neck: the Austrian Nobel Prize winner for literature Peter Handke presents “The Ballad of the Last Guest” at the age of almost 81. A deep-seated trauma becomes the starting point for a dream-like narrative about family, loss and nature.
At the beginning of the book, the main character and narrative character Gregor returns home from a distant continent for a visit. But on the way to his parents, sister and their baby, Gregor learns that his brother Hans was killed in a mission as a Foreign Legionnaire. Gregor can’t bring himself to tell his family about this and runs away from his parents’ house. He wanders around for days and nights – in the back rooms of various bars, in the gray area between city and country, and in the great outdoors.
The plot is rooted in a family story that runs through Handke’s work and which he also described in his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm in 2019: Handke’s uncle Gregor kept quiet about his brother Hans’ war death during his vacation at the front during the Second World War. The Hans in the “Ballad” not only bears traits of the fallen man, but also of Handke’s already deceased half-brother, who was also called Hans.
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Human and interpersonal aspects play an important role in Handke’s latest work, but are often only sketched out. In his descriptions of plants, landscapes and weather, Handke once again proves himself to be a razor-sharp and often funny observer. The author packs his descriptions of nature into grandiose sentences, which he scatters in the thicket of his text like bright autumn fruit.
But nature does not bring Gregor salvation. Because death lurks there too. In the end, the concentrated poetic language with which Handke summarizes not only the loneliness and pain, but also the hope of his not unlike protagonist in the last pages proves to be a relief.
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