"It was so cold

that no sooner had the clouds of smoke rising from the fire left the shelter of the boulder than they dispersed into wisps and vanished."  53   Is there a German song called The Left-Handed Woman or did he make it up?  Nope.  American blues singer Jimmy Reed sang it in 1964.  Must be on Youtube then.  Well, it is cold today, super bright sun on snow.  Wind picking up and will more so later.  I hope we can stay home.  Colin canceled piano because school canceled, carbon monoxide problem with the heating plant. 

Handke's slight novel is just wonderful.  So hard to describe exactly why, how.  Poetic not the right word because that has too much universal baggage with it, that word.  Surprising line after line, paragraph after paragraph.  Intriguingly so, a kind of fascination with the scene and characters and what exactly is going on that is just unusual, idiosyncratic.  Again, too ponderous a word.  They are hiking in the cold on a mountain side.  She recalls an abstract painting exhibit by an American of the stations of the cross and the effect on her vision of blurring after image of moving from the black painting to the white painting, from descent to tomb/resurrection.