WALDEN ON THE SEINE

A QUIRKY, HIGHLY WROUGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION BY PETER HANDKE, A SORT OF TEUTONIC SAMUEL BECKETT

Author: By Bill Marx

Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

Yet for someone who worships selflessness with passion, Handke yields to the temptation of autobiography, let alone sociability, with the ease of the truly self-involved. His first foray into nonfiction, 1984's ``The Weight of the World,'' was a sordid journal whose revelations focused on the inevitable sadism of creative introversion. That book's depiction of the long-distance loneliness of the artist was tersely echoed in 1989's moving ``The Afternoon of a Writer,'' an 86-page novella on regeneration that was about not `` `I as writer' but `the writer as I.' '' Here Handke disregards conventional narrative and characterization, exploring panic with an icy ambiguity that prefers consciousness over conscience. Still, even with the philosophical disclaimers and quotes from poets Goethe and Holderlin, the alienated mind behind the curtain is Handke's.

Whatever the metaphysical cloud cover, Handke has never been shy about his ``I.'' In 1967, the fledgling author made international headlines at a Princeton University literary conference, attacking the writing of giants Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll as ``mere description'' of social issues. Just last year, his slim nonfiction work, ``Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia,'' accused the Western media of demonizing the Serbs: His strident criticism and rhetorical sloppiness caused an international furor, sparking accusations of stupidity and moral obtuseness. After this book, Handke will never be read the same; even hearty fans have become suspicious of what lies beneath his shrill rejection of the modern and adoration of the primal purity of the peasantry.

In his fiction, Handke has fashioned the paradoxical ``I'' into a game of authorial hide-and-seek; the elusiveness of his irony shields him from the strident preaching that mars his nonfiction. Published in Germany in 1993, ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'' is Handke's most autobiographical fiction yet, a long confessional chronicle from an arch miniaturist, stuffed with his formidable strengths and frustrating weaknesses. At times devolving into the bloated noodlings of a monomaniac, the fat, meandering tome is not where a reader new to Handke should begin. (Among his early books, ``A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,'' a brittle remembrance of his working-class mother, remains indispensable. His most impressive recent achievement, 1988's ``Slow Homecoming,'' brings together three novellas that succeed in their aim ``to capture a harmony with language, and to pass it on contagiously.'')

For admirers with sufficient Handke under their belt, ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'' amply rewards picking through its haystacks of overwriting. Eccentric, self-indulgent, and lyrical, the book is a post-Holocaust ``Walden'' written by a nature-loving grouch. Our frazzled narrator is ``Gregor Keuschnig,'' a pseudonym for a lawyer turned writer who, like Handke, is now in his late 50s. Like Handke, he is obsessed with experiencing the thrill of fusing perception and imagination, observing nature by escaping the distractions and inhumanity of the modern urban world. The volume's three sections draw on Handke's interactions with a place -- a western suburb of Paris, where the author has lived after travels in Spain, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, and Greece.

The first portion has Keuschnig (a typical Handke protagonist) yearning to experience the zing of metamorphosis once again, deciding to spend a year completely alone, his start-up cogitations festooned with wry references to Handke's books, his first marriage, and to his child, though Handke's daughter becomes a rebellious 22-year-old son named Valentin. Keuschnig also imagines the seasonal pilgrimages of his son and six friends, who are referred to mostly by their professions (``the reader,'' ``the priest,'' ``the painter''). These mysterious figures are characters lifted from Handke's novels, satiric send-ups of his buddies and enemies, and aspects of the writer himself. (``The Painter'' makes an unsuccessful film; Handke directed the movie version of his story ``The Left-Handed Woman.'') In the conclusion, Keuschnig meticulously details his year of stalking new sensations and sights in the countryside, capping his experiences of mushroom hunting and flower spotting by uniting at Christmastime with his son and friends in a restaurant filled with ladders and an owner who barks out such cryptic wisdom as ``The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope.''

Handke hopes that the poetic insinuations of his epistemology will make up for plotlessness: ``The metamorphosis -- is it going to turn into a struggle again after all: between me, the monster of awareness, and me, the Tom Thumb of narration?'' The monster can be an angel. Gorgeous passages detail Keuschnig's discovery of the music of a huge hive of bees lodged deep in a cliff wall (``and I wished we might all have such ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death'') and describe a hornet who'd flown into a snail shell on the ground ``pushing and rolling it along. . . . It was now ripping and stripping the rotten flesh from its walls.'' But Handke is indeed a midget when it comes to storytelling, and the book is stuffed with self-indulgent rhetoric about urban alienation, weird political statements, bleak attempts at humor (``which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks''), and a penchant for pomposity that will infuriate those who find that all his personae proudly parade the same smug detachment from the everyday world. Krishna Winston's translation is fine, though Handke pushes her up against the linguistic wall in such awkward concoctions as ``language-eyes.''

In a sense, Handke acts out the fantasies of readers and critics, who, in the face of modern technology, seek to allay their fears by turning reading and writing into a religious fetish, a mystical quest for wholeness that, if carried too far, turns into microscopic self-worship. At one point, Handke fondly lists the pencils he used to write ``My Year in the No-Man's-Bay'': ``Thank you, white pencil from the honeymoon hotel in Nara, Japan! Thank you, twenty-second black Cumberland pencil!'' Still, like fellow grim quester Samuel Beckett, Handke dares to lose himself in no-man's-land: The silliness and shrillness of his solipsistic tub-thumping is the irksome byproduct of the beauty he brings back alive.