Alex Marshall and Christopher F Schuetze
Peter Handke, the Austrian author who received the on Tuesday, said recently that he hated opinions.
“I like literature,” he added, in a bad-tempered exchange during a news conference in Stockholm last week.
Unfortunately for 77, many people have opinions about him. Some see him as a genius who has pushed the boundaries of what novels and plays can be. But others are far less positive.
But some literary heavyweights see no better choice. “I can’t think of a more obvious Nobel laureate than him,” Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard said, adding that Handke had written masterpieces in every decade of his career.
“The great poet Handke has earned the Nobel prize 10 times,” Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian author who received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, said in a statement.
But few have had the chance to ask Handke himself in detail about his writing, or motivation. On 10 October, he met reporters at his home near Paris, but he ended the impromptu news conference after being asked about his writings on the Balkan wars. “I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes,” he said. “Leave me in peace and don’t ask me such questions.”
“He grew up in very poor conditions, in a remote provincial region,” said Malte Herwig, a journalist who wrote a biography of Handke. “It was dirt hard. He was the only one who went to college and so on.”
“He still has this air about him,” Herwig added. “If you look at his fingernails, there’s usually dirt underneath them.”
The family lived briefly in Berlin, but then returned to Griffen in 1948. During the journey, Handke’s sister was carried in a shopping bag, he wrote in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a stark account of his mother’s life and suicide that was published in 1972.
The Second World War and its aftermath had a clear effect, Herwig said. “He was a highly sensitive kid,” he said of Handke, describing him as “nervous, easily aroused with anger, or easily startled” and “totally a square peg in a round hole”.
Handke made his childhood a focus of his Nobel lecture, saying that his mother’s stories – about the tragic life of an “idiot” milkmaid, and the death of her brother – had “provided the impetus for my almost lifelong career as a writer”.
“He had the sense for Yugoslavia as this incredible, rich multicultural state that lacked the kind of nationalisms that he saw in Germany and Austria,” Abbott said. “It was almost a utopian place for him.”
When Yugoslavia collapsed, Handke saw that utopia disappearing, Abbott said.
Zarko Radakovic, a friend who has travelled in the region with Handke, and who has translated his work, said in a telephone interview that “Yugo-nostalgia” was central to the writer’s worldview.
“Of course it is very difficult to write about civil war,” Radakovic said. Handke, he added, “just wanted to be a counterweight to everything that had been written and said in the media. He went there and walked and described.”
Radakovic and other Handke supporters believe that the critics had focused on a few controversial passages in Handke’s works, but had not read enough to judge the author’s motives.
“Handke is such a complex, difficult author,” Radakovic said. “All of his 87 works are somehow connected.”
“I trust somebody who is so completely free of clichés and just sees the world and reacts,” he added.
Herwig said he had no problem with Handke’s criticism of journalistic language, but added: “He eventually did some of the things he accused journalists of: false bias, false contextualisation.”
But even many of Handke’s most ardent supporters have difficulty explaining why he spoke at Milosevic’s funeral. “I look at those photos of him, against that huge photo of Milosevic, and I just think, ‘What the hell?’” Abbott said.
He added that Handke has insisted his funeral speech was not an endorsement of Milosevic, but a lament for Yugoslavia. “But what he’s stepping aside from is that if he stands there, that means something, too,” Abbot said.
Other writers would have backed down in the face of such condemnation, but Handke has not. “I need not defend or take back a single word,” Handke wrote in the preface to the American edition of A Journey to the Rivers. “I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.”
Herwig said this was not arrogance; “It’s defiance,” he said.
Clearly, for the Swedish Academy, the work takes precedence. Rebecka Karde, a journalist who advised the committee that awards the prize, said that Handke had “said, written and done things I find hard to stomach”. But, she added, that did not mean he did not deserve the award.
Handke went to Serbia “trying to unlock the world through his unique, idiosyncratic, literary presence”, Knausgaard said. “But the ambiguity and complexity that language offered, charged with Handke’s sympathies, unlocked a Pandora’s box of grief, anger and despair instead.”
Viewing Handke as some sort of diabolical figure, Knausgaard added, was the opposite of the people in his writings. “The world and the people in it never are black, never are white, never are good, never are bad,” he said, “but all these things combined.”
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