The Moravian Night: A Story by Peter Handke

By Peter Handke           Time-Travelling Tale of a Europe in Flux (NY Times)

                                                   

Despite some opposition due to negative reactions to the writer´s receiving the Nobel Prize of 2019, which, in turn were due to his public support of President Milosevic after  the Balkan wars in the nineties, the group had agreed we should read a novel by him. The Moravian Night, apparently the most important novel of his career,   had been recommended by Anne. None of us were familiar with this writer, but we discovered that he belongs to the most important German language writer after the WWII:  he had once been relied upon to de-Nazify their culture and he indeed commands one of the great German-language prose styles of the post war period. Since the first of his 100 or so books of fiction, poetry, essays and plays appeared in 1966, his talent has been inarguable, and yet it has almost exclusively been a talent for the aesthetic. No one has ever read Handke for his ideas, but for his hostility to ideas;

Longlisted for the 2008  German Book Prize , (he rejected the nomination, according to himself, out of respect for the younger writers on the list. The book was also longlisted for the 2008  European Book Prize  and received the Nobel Prize 2019 .

He was born in 1942 in Carinthia, a heavily Slavic province of Austria. After his Slovenian mother´s suicide in 1971, Yugoslavia — historic homeland of the South Slavs — became a maternal surrogate. But despite his occasional visits, he never seemed to know it as anything other than a figment of delusion. He would apostrophize the Socialist Federal Republic as “the Balkans” — a multi ethnic paradise of farmers whose hearts were filled with wine and song, untainted by the trappings of capitalism. He made this false consciousness public just as reality collapsed; in 1991, he published a pamphlet against Slovenian independence, and over the next decade of constant war other non-fiction texts criticizing the media coverage which, he claimed, refused to hold Croats accountable for the persecution of Serbs during World War II ( the Jasenovac concentration camp was an extermination camp established  by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. T he Ustasa facist regime killed over 83,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists in the camp between 1941 and 1945),  and raising doubts that seemed like denials of the Serbian massacres of Bosnian Muslims. 

We follow, or try to, Handke’s hero´s, or maybe rather an anti- hero´s journey across Europe and his self-questioning; the “former writer” didn’t abandon his profession to pursue a political truth, but a political emotion. "In this story, where memory and reality battle, Handke once again showcases his valuable insight and imagination." ^[

Here and there, the novel’s submerged plot comes up for air; namely, the ways in which the contemporary world, or the contemporary Balkans, have betrayed Handke, or just failed to live up to his imagination.

The “former writer” finds the Balkans that emerges from the fogs, toward the conclusion of “The Moravian Night,” unrecognizable: a fractious patchwork of new alphabets and towers, repopulated by strangers equipped with smartphones, whose “comportment clashed with his conception, or his will? his ideal? his idea?

Modern Serbian state has been formed in the valley of the Morava,   the longest and most significant river in Serbia. Its fertile valley is a cradle of the first, medieval, Serbian state, Moravska Serbia, with rich cultural and historical heritage, like orthodox churches and monasteries . A new artistic direction was created right here in, the “Moravska School.
The mountain ridge of Hartz was the border between East and West Germany.

Blanka

  

THE MORAVIAN NIGHT 

                                                                                                          

This novel  is essentially a tale,  told by a former-writer to guests he has convened for a whole night  on board  his boat ( his refuge) « The Moravian Night » . The boat is moored  on the Morava in the enclave of Porodin, the last Serbian enclave.

There is a symbolism of the word « night », name of the boat  and time of day.

The former writer is going to tell his guests about his long bus-trip through Europe .

Why is it  so important for him  to tell  them / us about it ?

 I think it is because the story is first and  foremost an  exploration of his  inner self. And we understand that there is a lot of P. Handke himself in the main character. 

This trip has been spured by an attempt to flee from some « danger » ( lurking  everywhere in the book), from a woman who tried to  reduce him to silence, from the trauma of fatherlessness, and from the horrors of the war.

During this trip, the former-writer  also retraces his steps to places he had been to  in Europe in the past,  before attending   a symposium about « Noise »  in  the most  godforsaken  and desolate place in Spain, Numencia.

While going back to his homeland , he assesses the changes in the world  and tries to make sense of   what has happened. 

We were puzzled by the fact that P. Handke  mixes real places with imaginary ones, always bare, lonely , desolate places where he meets weird people .

Realism alternates with day-dreaming.  In the end of the story, life is just a delusion.

Whether we call this magic-realism or surrealism or «  merveilleux » in French, doesn’t matter.  It is a novel and there is no need to find  it rational.

I really did appreciate the elegiac description of many places steeped in loneliness.

P. Handke has also used an incredibly rich  vocabulary to describe «  noises », all of them.

It was a very good read, not easy but worth the effort.

                                                                                                            

Anne Van Calster