Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Don Juan: His Own Version

Name: Don Juan: His Own Version
Author: Peter Handke
ISBN: 9780374142315

by Peter Handke, Krishna Winston

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Overview

"In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his unique take on history's best-known lover. Don Juan's story - "his own version" - is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space." In this brief and wry volume, Peter Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

Synopsis

A MODERN MASTER’S WRY AND ENTERTAINING TAKE ON HISTORY’S BEST-KNOWN LOVER

In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his take on the famous seducer. Don Juan’s story—“his own version”—is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke’s Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.

In this brief and wry volume, Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

Publishers Weekly

Don Juan catapults over a garden wall and into the life of an anonymous narrator in this short, frustrating novel. Over the course of a week, the narrator, a lonely French innkeeper, listens to Don Juan relate the adventures that culminate with his arrival at the inn. In the preceding seven days, Don has traveled from Tbilisi to Damascus, Norway, Holland and then to “the last country, completely nameless” before making his way to the French inn. The reason for his travels is never made clear, nor is his motivation for relating his story to the innkeeper. This sense of mysterious imbalance is compounded by the narrator's recounting of Don Juan's tales, which often deal with seductions and couplings either offstage or with clinical swiftness. The pointedly dry story about a character famous as a connoisseur of pleasures holds interest as a concept, but the novel's entertainment value is quickly buried under a pile of unanswered questions, and the endless deferring of literal and figurative climaxes feels almost like punishment. (Feb.)

About the Author, Peter Handke

PETER HANDKE was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many works include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in No-Man’s Bay, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Austrian author Handke's (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos) latest novel to be translated into English is narrated not by Don Juan but by a lonely French innkeeper into whose garden the protagonist tumbles one day. During his stay at the inn, Don Juan recounts his previous week's adventures, and the innkeeper becomes Don Juan's confidant. Over the course of that "womanweek," Don Juan travels as far as Damascus and Norway, encountering a new woman each day. At first Don Juan is like a mythological character. The narrator describes him as a veritable St. Francis, nourished by sorrow (he was devastated by the loss of his only child), with the ability to magic rare and wonderful foodstuffs out of thin air. The narrator's impression of Don Juan, however, changes after the week of storytelling has concluded. Whatever was awe-inspiring seems to dissipate, and Don Juan becomes just a regular man with irritating quirks. VERDICT Readers coming to this novel expecting tales of excitement and seduction or detailed accounts of the lothario's encounters will be disappointed. A literary and philosophical look at the subject.—Karen Walton Morse, Univ. at Buffalo Libs.

Kirkus Reviews

A slim, odd volume in which the Austrian novelist (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 2007, etc.) spins a story about storytelling. The German-language original from 2004 receives an English-language translation, but the anonymous narrator of this tale fails to translate Don Juan's exploits into a compelling account. And perhaps that's part of the point, for despite the subtitle "His Own Version," the voice throughout is that of a chef whose country French inn is all but shuttered until it receives as its guest (or fugitive) a breathless Don Juan, on the run from a motorcycle couple whose lovemaking had apparently been interrupted by his voyeurism. This Don Juan is not the figure of literary history, but a contemporary version (or almost contemporary, as one reference to a Walkman instead of an iPod suggests). Don Juan stays at the inn exactly a week, and on each day relates to the innkeeper what had happened on that day of the previous week-a different adventure, a different woman, a different country. Or does he? The narrator himself has no gift for narration, and Don Juan doesn't give him much with which to work. "Again he did not describe the woman to me-needless to say, she was ‘indescribably beautiful,' " says the narrator, who later refers to the "meager details" offered by the guest. "At least that is how I pictured it, without his offering any details," admits the narrator in recounting another episode. So, instead of Don Juan's own story, as promised by the subtitle, this is the narrator's story, conjured by the barest of prompts from his subject. The reader might even suspect that this Don Juan doesn't exist at all, for the narrator never quotes him directly. Instead, he provides aparenthetical hint as to the nature of his protagonist: "(I noticed how often in his story Don Juan used the indefinite pronoun ‘one' instead of ‘I,' as if it were self-evident that what he experienced was applicable to everyone.)"Whether you call it "postmodern" or "meta-fiction," there isn't much here.