The Moravian Night

October 10, 2016
The Moravian Night is the name of a boat moored on the Morava River, where a gathering takes place in which a writer tells friends the story of a journey he once took through Europe. The book’s journey appears to begin in Kosovo. The somewhat unreliable narrator tells his friends of “following the example of the rivers,” meandering through Spain, Portugal, and Handke’s native Austria, before circling back to the Balkans, which no longer exist the way the storyteller once knew them. He encounters a varied cast of characters. Few places are named, nor does the reader ever know precisely where the narrator is, on land or in the mind, recollecting, philosophizing, dreaming. Further muddling the narrative are the friends the narrator has gathered, who sometimes take up or interrupt the story with their own version of things during the long dark night. At the center is a woman, on the boat and in the story, a mysterious figure lurking, serving, talking, perhaps even orchestrating. In this story where memory and reality battle, Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) once again showcases his valuable insight and imagination.

Starred review from October 1, 2016
The renowned Austrian novelist looks back on a body of work and a terrible century in this elegiac tale, first published in German in 2008.Every country has its Samarkand and its Numancia. So opens Handkes (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 2007, etc.) novel, evoking the Thousand and One Nights, Cervantes, Machado, Borges. These fabled places of refuge on the far ends of the world are joined by a houseboat on the Morava River, a tributary of the Danube where the Slavic and German worlds meet and armies have long clashed. There, a storyteller gathers a group of friends, associates, distant neighbors, collaborators of the former writer, for whom, in the face of deep danger, he offers a multitiered, time-shifting tale that crosses borders and decades, one in which figures from other Handke novels make appearances, to say nothing of angels and demons. Some of Handkes text is a kind of meditation on history; having come under much criticism a quarter-century ago for his defense of Serbia during the most recent round of Balkans wars, he places that region on the edges of Numantia and Samarkand, joining it to the fabulous: Where had they begun, his and our Balkans? Long before the geographic and morphological border. Some of it is a subtly defiant self-defense, begging the question of who turned out to be right: A sad story? the tale closes. That remained to be seen. And some is simply lovely, as when, in one of his guises, the narrator, passing across La Manchashades of Cervantes againsuddenly confronts his literary and actual past: One after the other, his forebears came toward him in the early light, reached him, went by him. All play a role in his life and story, he adds, one whose threads are still playing out even as Handkes modern epic ends. A sad storyperhaps, but one in which fantasy and history dance nimbly. Stellar.

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October 15, 2016
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This gem from Marcel Proust could not be more relevant to acclaimed Austrian writer Handke's meandering, semiautobiographical, fictional travelogue, which is more an account of self-discovery and a continent's gradual evolution than a strict accounting of sights seen. Sure, the writer-narrator describes tables groaning with food and plenty of quaint villages studding the landscape, but the shell of the story consists of recounting his travels across Europe, noticing the tiniest of fissures in the notion of a united Europe. As his protagonist travels from the gloomy Balkans to Spain and beyond, Handke (Don Juan: His Own Version, 2010) describes not just a continent in flux, where once rancid-tasting Montenegrin olive oil is now good enough to compete with the best that Tuscany pours, but also crafts a journey of growth, in which the narrator must make peace with the ghosts of his own past. A searching exploration of how travel and storytelling can help us find our truest selves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)