Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 1994, Издательство: Farrar Straus Giroux, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

My Year in No Man's Bay: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «My Year in No Man's Bay»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Peter Handke has been acclaimed as "unmistakably one of the best writers we have in that self-discovering tendency we call post-modernism" (Malcolm Bradbury, New York Times Book Review). In his new novel. Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer — a man much like Handke himself — who explores world and describes his many severed relationships, ranging from the fragile connection with his son, to a failed marriage to "the Catalan", to a doomed love with a former Miss Yugoslavia. As the writer sifts through his memories, he is also under pressure to complete his next novel, but he cannot decide how to come to terms with both the complexity of the world and the inability of his novel to reflect it.A mysterious, haunting work, My Year in the No-Man's-Bay reflects what one critic has called "an intensity that scalds the reader" (Paul Duguid, San Francisco Chronicle).

My Year in No Man's Bay — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «My Year in No Man's Bay», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Across from me, right behind the bank with the lizards, which had already slipped away, and the first trees, was the empty and, to outward appearances, rather gloomy spot where I had been crouching or squatting only a little while ago, and before that the entire day. And at the thought of all the happenings during the course of a day along this woodland path, barely a few hours on foot from the Eiffel Tower, I was filled with an astonishment as powerful as that I had experienced much earlier for at most a moment when half asleep; and the question that Gregor Keuschnig had asked himself a quarter of a century earlier took on new validity: “Who can say, after all, that the world has already been discovered?”

To write I went out into nature, into the fresh air, into the day, into the wind, into the forest, and then if possible every morning, right through the summer and far into the fall. (As recently as yesterday I remained stretched out there until I could hardly make out my own handwriting, and that was also because of the evening dew, for the pencils did not mark properly on the damp paper.)

A couple of times, when the rain became too heavy, penetrating the leaf canopy and not letting up, I continued with my writing in one of the few public buildings in the bay, but hardly ever back at my house; I have been spending more time in my study only since the somewhat quieter days of early winter.

In bad weather I most often sought refuge in the bay’s little post office, the “auxiliary post office”—in general the local agencies have modifiers like “branch,” “annex,” or “provisoire.” There was a counter there intended specifically for filling out forms, even a windowsill, a spacious, broad one for propping one’s arms on and looking out, just as I had wished for from the beginning for my writing year.

Outside the window nothing was to be seen but an area marked off by a brick-red wall at the rear, resembling a grove with its few widely spaced spruces and birches, on the ground the short, thick, yet never mowed grass and the several-year layers of spruce needles and cones, among which then in the course of the summer new white-and-red mushroom caps kept erupting, harvested by me with the consent of the postmistress. This woman was alone most of the time and knitted behind the counter or talked on the telephone, as loudly as — fortunately for my concentration — incomprehensibly; she was almost deaf. The fact that I came in out of the storm, sat there, and went away again without ever leaving a letter with her did not disturb her.

When she did have customers, as a rule they were older people, with postal savings accounts. Once there was a telegram to be sent, in Spanish, and it took her an hour to transmit the few words by telephone because of having to spell out everything several times, especially the address. The little place had no telex, for there was no demand, and when a person from elsewhere blew in one day wanting to send a “chronopost” overseas, she explained to him that this was the first time she had ever been asked to do this kind of mailing, whereupon the stranger drove off with his express package, to a post office outside the bay.

Otherwise a great stillness prevailed in the auxiliary post office, without the thumping of rubber stamps or radio music; at most the postmistress’s little dog sometimes shifted in his basket. Nothing but the slapping of the rain against the windowpanes; a pattern of shadow from that on the windowsill, or a flash of lightning.

The disadvantage was only that this branch closed early, and thus I sometimes finished my day of recording in the next bay over, in the back room of the restaurant run by the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, whose raging misanthropy I had almost been driven to share by my neighbors’ racket; from time to time it did me good.

In his rooms, too, there by the railroad embankment, in a former station restaurant, there were windowsills, wide ones, extending out to my ribs, and even the benches that went with them, as in the ancestral house in the Jaunfeld village of Rinkolach, and all of this shaken again and again by the wonderful rumbling of the trains directly above me.

In this year the weather changed constantly, and always from one hour to the next. But whenever possible I sat outdoors with my project, out in the woods. And what then became my main sitting place was the spot that had attracted me most powerfully earlier on when I was out walking and doing nothing.

Writing beside a body of water was even more promising than writing beside a path. At first I tried it with the three ponds in the bay, one after the other. For a few days I worked halfway up the hill by a sunken road behind the Etang des Ursines, in the largest and also the oldest part of the settlement, where the prehistoric flintstone and stone ax had been found; after that at the weathered picnic table behind the pond with the crayfish, with the mental image of the war correspondent, now dead, of his shock of hair standing up, his stubble-beardedness, his paleness, his total incomprehension of a person like me; then by the one surrounded entirely by woods, without houses in view, called Hole-in-Glove Pond, under the birches there; everywhere I made good progress, except that I did not like to be seen with paper and pencil — some people did pass by, who, however, mistook what I was doing for drawing; none of them came up close — and except that some fishermen had transistor radios with them.

Nonetheless I finally set out for that body of water which, although it always struck me as the only really old one and also the most extensive one in all the forests of the Seine hills, is not marked on any map of the area, even the most detailed, nor does it have a name, even in the folklore of the bay (but who knows?), and which I privately call, after neither “bayou” (Mississippi) nor “Everglades” (Florida) stuck, the Nameless Pond.

Yet the word “pond” does not fit this puddle either, at the sight of which at least the first passersby call back their children or their dogs with exclamations of disgust and horror. In fact its surface, and not only during a longer drought, looks bubbly sometimes or glistens with an oily film, and I have hardly ever been able to see all the way to the bottom. Trees, long since dead, barkless all the way up, naked, only the whitish-gray trunks remaining, with a few broken-off forks of branches, stand there in the water, among those that have tumbled in from the banks and are still green, and aquatic vegetation with dark-haired root tangles below (masses of them in the light of low water).

A puddle, and yet extending far out? Yes, and this on the one hand by virtue of its complicated shape, going around one corner and then another, entirely different from a man-made pond, and especially by virtue of that unique shimmer of distance or enigma in its most remote spits, with a view through the vegetation and dead tree trunks, over hundreds of sawed-off trunks barely rising above the water, a glow of distance reliable in a way I have never encountered in a puddle, but also not in a full-grown lake, either in that of Gennesaret or that of Michigan or that of Neusiedl. Every time, from sitting there awhile, from the farthest tongues of the puddle, along with the water’s edge, air, and shore, even when nothing was moving, a pull emanated.

And in such an environment I settled down one lovely spring day to continue my work, and that became my established place, except during torrential rains, until the first frosts.

It was in the thicket on the other side of the Nameless Pond, but I had a view of the water, through a long cut, all the way to the bays in the more accessible bank; but anyone standing over there would have had to look hard to catch sight of me, until the time of leaf drop.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «My Year in No Man's Bay»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «My Year in No Man's Bay» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «My Year in No Man's Bay»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «My Year in No Man's Bay» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x