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In his latest novel, acclaimed author Peter Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer who explores the world and describes his many severed relationships--ranging from a fragile connection with his son to a failed marriage to a doomed love with a former Miss Yugoslavia. This is a mysterious, haunting work, considered somewhat autobiographical.Amazon.com Review
"There was one time in my life when I experiencedmetamorphosis."

A novel that begins with a sentence like this and also featuresa main character named Gregor obviously has serious ambitions from theget-go. But readers of Austrian writer Peter Handke's previous fictionwould expect nothing less. Handke, author of The Left-HandedWoman, Slow Homecoming, and Repetition was alsoresponsible for co-writing German director Wim Wenders's magicalexploration of fallen angels, Wings of Desire. In all of hiswork, plot and character are subsumed by concerns about language,meaning, and the process of reflection. My Year in theNo-Man's-Bay is another example of Handke's personal obsessionsand his unorthodox literary style. The plot, such as it is, features amiddle-aged writer named Gregor K. (a nod to Kafka's famousprotagonist in The Metamorphosis) who lives in a Parissuburb. Gregor sets out to write about the metamorphosis he himselfexperienced 20 years earlier from active artist--a molder offiction--to passive chronicler of the world as he sees it. As heremembers his various love affairs, his failed marriage, hisrelationship with his children, he also struggles with the shape ofthe current novel he is working on.Not a book to be picked upcasually, My Year in No-Man's-Bay is demanding, abstract, andso intensely introspective as to be occasionally claustrophobic.Still, readers interested in this kind of meta-fiction will no doubtfind much to admire in Handke's novel. ... Read more

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The Tale is the Teller
Austrian novelist, playwright and screenwriter Peter Handke is someone who seeks to alienate his work from the artificiality of life; in doing so his work, itself, becomes rather alienating.

Handke first gained attention in 1966 when he denounced Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll for, as he saw it, compromising the novel by making it a vehicle for social criticism.Like many French writers, Handke believed that novelists should register conscious experiences only, and then render them as austerely as possible.

Handke is a novelist who never creates a character.Instead, he folds his characters into his prose.He never constructs a real plot.Instead, he chronicles the very plotlessness (and pointlessness) of life.Handke finally decided that writers had their own personal stories to tell rather than telling those of the characters they made up.His novel, The Afternoon of a Writer told the story of, the afternoon of a writer.No more, no less.

My Year in the No-Man's Bay is the sequel to The Afternoon of a Writer.Although many readers may find this novel's content to be less-than-stimulating, I don't think anyone could say its structure is less-than-breathtaking.

The protagonist is a fifty-five year old writer who attempts to recall a year long artistic and spiritual metamorphosis.This writer is poetically named Gregor Keuschnig, and is known only as Gregor K.(Those who are at all familiar with Handke will immediately recognize this as a jab at Kafka, one of Handke's least favorite authors.)Gregor, who is obviously Handke's alter-ego, has grown disenchanted with both city life and country life and has moved to the suburbs of Paris instead.The city and the countryside, says Gregor, have been much overused as the setting in more traditional novels.

Throughout the book, Gregor uses the French word, banlieue, for suburb.But banlieue could also mean "place of the outlaws," and, as such, it represents for Gregor, a chance to mine new linguistic and narrative terrain; a sort of "no-man's bay," a nameless body of water.(Apparently American writers who are notorious for setting their novels in the suburbs, John Updike, in particular, have escaped Handke's notice.)

Gregor first writes at length about the difficulties and problems all writers face, bringing us right up to the year of his metamorphosis in the suburbs which is what he really wants to describe in the first place.He has a very difficult time doing so, however, as he gets bogged down time and again in what he calls "prehistories."

The novel's last section, The Day, is a section in which Gregor collapses all time together.His year of metamorphosis, we come to realize, could be the year he is writing about or the year he is writing in or the year in which one of his "stories" takes place.It is up to the reader to decide.

Life, itself, intrudes on Gregor's writing abilities until his novel and his life become one and the same, inseparable.What he visualizes as being of no consequence, the stuff of novels, has become his daily world.Or, has his daily world become the stuff of his novel?

My Year in the No-Man's Bay can, at times, be a very intellectually stimulating book but, unfortunately, it is also very dry.Handke's reliance on theme over character and plot might be a good idea, but in this book, at least, it is really not believable and certainly not engrossing.At least not all of the time.

This book is certainly not all bad.Gregor's wife, Ana, despite Handke's intentions to ignore character, is particularly engrossing, as is Heraclitus, one of the novel's spirits.Unfortunately, most of My Year in the No-man's Bay is narcissistic, spiritual pretension.Handke likens both Gregor and the character of Valentin to Christ.He feels that both St. Paul and St. John are but kindred spirits and he even goes so far as to liken Gregor's metamorphosis with Christ's resurrection.

Handke co-wrote the screenplay for Wenders's Wings of Desire, a stunning movie about angels who descend to earth.In My Year in the No-Man's Bay, he seems to have taken the tremendous success of Wings of Desire a little too much too heart (although Wings deserved all the success that was heaped upon it).In this book Handke constantly make references to wings and to angels that just don't work.Unfortunately, in his desire to kill off everything that is pretentious and artificial in the novel, Handke has killed off everything that is human as well.My Year in the No-Man's Bay is still a book well worth reading, but only if a highly thematic, plotless book is one that suits your style.

I read this book in both English and in the original German.I did find the English translation to be clumsy and overly-literal.Handke always writes a gorgeous, mesmerizing German that is both winding and spare and always elegant and, if you can read German and want to read this book, the original is the far, far better choice. ... Read more

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Published for the first time in English, a book that sparked controversy throughout Europe views the Balkan conflict from a Serbian perspective that includes a heated critique of the Western media.Amazon.com Review
In Europe, where it has been seen as pro-Serbian, journalistPeter Handke's meditative essay on ethnic conflict in the formerYugoslavia has been stirring up a great deal of controversy. ButHandke, a German and a longtime resident of Paris, disavowsnationalist partisanship. Instead, he works to unravel the tangles ofethnic hatred, snarled over generations and centuries, to discoverwhether peace is possible in the Balkans, and he reserves his enmityfor the European media, which, he maintains, has systematicallymisunderstood the collapse of the former communist world. This book isimpressionistic and short--you can read it over coffee in about anhour--but also deeply thoughtful, and deeply unsettling. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

A SHORT work,thought provoking and yet.....
Things work out strangely on ones journey through life. Picture me stranded with broken fan belt on the way home from work on my wife's birthday. That morass overcome,and truck in shop, I drove the family car to work on Thanksgiving morning, departing earlier than usual for whatever reason. On a sixty-five mile drive, what do I encounter but a broken down vehicle in the same exact spot I languished in just a few days before. Now only five minutes from my office and well ahead of schedule, I was transporting a brother and sister to a nearby apartment. They were fresh from Kosovo. Speaking little english, we bade each other farewell and they were in my thoughts often in the coming weeks. Christmas shopping for year 2000 led me to a discount bookstore where I found this work as well as a stack of others on the Balkans. I would rate this book more highly were it not for the price (...) It was admitted to by the author in the preface to the American edition:the text apeared on two weekends in the Suddeutsche Zeitung. It is a mere pair of clippings,granted.
On to the merits of the book:Handke states the war was the reason for his journey, and that he was "drawn" to the country (Serbia) of the disintegrating Yugoslavia "least known to me". In my impression, he observes and questions constantly all aspects of the situation. He has experienced, from Germany, through the slant of the media lens what he sees as distortion.Here he tries hard to gain a proper perspective during the short journey he has through the countryside. A worthy read and best read twice, as I am about to do.

Lyrical questions
I know nothing about Serbia beyond what the press commonly reports. This book is the first I have read about that country. It makes no apologies for Serbian atrocities. It does, however, lyrically call journalists and journalism to task.

Written in German in late 1995 for a European audience, this 82-page book applies equally to the U.S.I speak as a former journalist who, during 25 years of largely national U.S. writing, plumbed every side to every question before reaching conclusions--always over-reporting to find nuances, and often reaching conclusions only as I wrote. It was a handicap not easily overcome.

That is not how many, perhaps even most, journalists work. The fault is built into the system. Editors expect reporters to have an angle before they present an idea. Without a hook, assignments are often not made. Editors will deny it, but they expect reporters to have reached some conclusion before they begin reporting, and to report to prove their points. In other words, they routinely ask journalists to put the cart before the horse--an especially troubling phenomenon in this era of political correctness.

Reporters say they are after truth and good. Most are in fact after the big game, the story to make them famous, a kill. Nowadays CNN hires television actors as news anchors. You get the picture. Ironically, on big stories covered by throngs--which I intensely disliked and avoided, and which of course include wars--reporters tend to mimic each other, to sit around after they file, bragging about their prowess. The largest braggarts are also often the least talented.

Institutionalized problems have a depressing effect on journalism. Few stories are black and white. But most present that illusion, although they are products of very little, if any, deductive thought. Certainly, nuances do not surface in short sound bites feeding most news wires. Peter Handke seems to know all this--and a great deal of philosophy.

Serbia aside, this book shows, in near-poetic language, that things are not always as journalists portray them. For that alone, Handke's tiny volume is worth its weight in gold. Alyssa A. Lappen

mike.milakovic@mailexcite.com
I don't know how these last few people have been able to write reviews of this book because I've been trying to get my hands on this book for about a year now and all bookstores online are out of them. If anyone who is reading this can figure out a way I can have a chance to read this book,please email me at the address mentioned above. I'd greatly appreciate it.Thanks All!

A Journey to the Rivers; Justice for Serbia
An excellent book for those who wish to want to have an alternative prespective and source of information with respect to the conflicts in Yugoslavia.

While the editorial reviews were negative, they are alsohypocritical, as it is appears unlikely that either of the two editorialreviewers have any first-hand information, but instead are regurgitatinginformation from the western press (one of the key points which Handkeraises).

finely crafted magic
Once again, Handke tackles a difficult issue with masterful language. Upon its publication, the book received numerous negative responses by many critics who clearly had not read the piece. This carefully constructed booknever "sides" with anyone, instead it attempts to seek outquestions rather than answers. It is a dense difficult piece that is madevery accessible by Scott Abbott's fine translation. I strongly recommend itand urge you to read it with an open mind. ... Read more

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Fantastic
Along with Holderin, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Thomas Mann, Peter Handke is one of the greatest writers EVER to write in the German language.I've included Nietszche here because of his awsomecontrol over the language and not because he is a fiction writer.Thathaving been said, Across is, in my opinion, one of Handke's best books,however there are many others that are very close.Handke is obsessed withthe detached observer and this work deals with a man who is fascinated bythreshholds and how he goes through a kind of metaphysical transformationinto one who has crossed the threshold and perhaps graduated to anotherlevel of being.The story is centered around an impartial observer of lifewho suddenly finds himself beating the crap out of a neo nazi and in thissense coming to "participate" in life.Handke's decriptions ofnature and city landscapes are phenomenal in that they evoke with greatcolor and clarity but without any sense of strain caused by forcedmetaphors or clunky words.There is an effortlessnes and beauty to theentire presentation, which in the hands of a less gifted writer would havecome off as heavy and plodding and overdone.

A true masterpiece andwhat seems so strange is that this man is virtually unknown in America orBriatin.Even at Foyles in London the staff didn't know who I was talkingabout.Odd for a person who has been involved with famous directors likeWim Wenders...

One of the truly indispensible novels of the century inthe German language.Stars?Hmmm.How many stars did the roof of theCistene Chapel get? ... Read more

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In the summer of 1960, young Filip Kobal leaves his home to search for his missing brother. He is led not only in the direction of his brother, but to an investigation of language and to recapturing a past. ... Read more

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complex study of human journey
A rich and dense book that examines the very core of what it means to be human. Handke's intricately constructed narrative works on several levels giving the reader much to digest. It's threefold structure is at firstdifficult to interpret, but on repeated readings one begins to understandthe significance of smaller fragmented incidents scattered throughout thetext. If possible one should read the original and use the dictionary as acompanion, just as the protagonist Filip Kobal does. One of the best booksby one of our best contemporary authors. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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