A Formidable and Unique Austerity

By Paul Gray

THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN by Peter Handke

Translated by Ralph Manheim; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 89 pages; $7.95

Austrian Peter Handke, 35, first achieved fame in Europe as a flamboyantly avant-garde dramatist. His best-known play, Offending the Audience, did just that: insulted by the actors' dialogue and by the evident purposelessness of their actions, spectators stormed the stage when the drama was produced in Frankfurt. Handke's reputation in America is altogether more modest and is chiefly based on four novels that are less strident than his plays but every bit as puzzling and unsettling. The Left-Handed Woman, a novella, will provoke more admiration and head scratching.

Precious few incidents occur. Marianne, 30, decides that Bruno, her well-to do executive husband, will some day leave her, so she throws him out on the spot. Then she takes long walks through nearby woods, through an unnamed West German city and through the halls and rooms of her rented house. A friend asks her to join what seems to be a women's consciousness-raising group, but Marianne does not. She works at a translation of a French book about a woman trying to achieve independence; if there is a message here for Marianne, she does not get it. Friends, relatives and casual acquaintances gather round her and then disperse as aimlessly as they came. At the end, the woman is virtually catatonic.

Handke refuses to embroider this minimal plot in any of the usual ways. Marianne does not ruminate in an interesting or even terribly coherent manner about her situation. Other characters tell her that she may come to a bad end but do not say why. There is no fancy writing to divert the eye or the mind. Translator Ralph Manheim captures an English equivalent of Handke's German prose: dry, simple and spare, as if the author were trying to strip language of as much resonance as possible. Even forward momentum is thwarted; the story is chopped into segments, some hardly more than snippets: "On a cold morning the woman sat in a rocking chair on the terrace, but she wasn't rocking. The child stood beside her, watching the clouds of vapor that came out of his mouth. The woman looked into the distance; the pines were reflected in the window behind her."

Added to these oddities is dialogue that frequently sounds like a parody of existential maundering. Marianne talks to her father: "Does the time still hang as heavy on your hands as when you were young?" One of her friends approaches a stranger and remarks, "Why don't you join a political party?" By all rights, posturing or off-center exchanges such as these should make a mockery of the whole enterprise.

They do not. Handke's techniques only seem casual, even haphazard; in truth, they are rigorously philosophical. His power stems from the very limitations he clamps on his art. While refusing to spell out anything other than rudiments, he hints at vast areas of life that are beyond the power of words to express or minds to grasp. By the standards of conventional fiction, his characters are little more than ciphers, but they arouse considerable interest and sympathy simply by facing up to the ominous atmosphere that pervades their lives. If something terrible has not already happened to them, it will. They shrug, say silly, inadequate things and go on.

Handke's combination of Kafka's elemental terror and Wittgenstein's linguistic austerity is both formidable and unique. Certainly no one of note now writing in the U.S. works in his mode.

Distinctly imports, his books are thus something of an acquired taste. As this short, haunting tale proves again, that taste is well worth pursuing.

Paul Gray

Excerpt

"On his way out Bruno shook his head and said, 'You take it so lightly...Do you even remember that there was once a closeness between us that may have been based on the fact of our being man and wife but went far beyond it?'

The woman shut the door behind him and stood there. She heard the car driving off; she went to the coatrack beside the door and thrust her head in among the coats.

As the dusk deepened, the woman did not turn on the light but sat looking at the television screen. Their set had a special channel for watching the colony playground. The silent black-and-white image revealed her son balancing himself on a tree trunk, while his fat friend kept falling off; except for the two of them, the playground was forsaken. The woman's eyes glistened with tears."

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