“My day in the other country. A story of demons” (Mein Tag im anderen Land), by Peter Handke, translated from German (Austria) by Julien Lapeyre de Cabanes, Gallimard, “From the whole world”, 80 p., €12, digital €8.50.
The new story of Peter Handke, My day in the other country.His seventh work translated into French since his Nobel Prize in Literature, received in 2019, is one of the writer’s texts that is difficult to classify: they are either a novel, a story or even a prose poem (let us also mention Moravian Night EITHER The fruit thief2011 and 2020, Gallimard). Reading Handke means accepting entering a world absorbed by language and that suddenly disorganizes our usual reading points. However, the writer never seeks to lose us, only to disorient us – which promises a very high level of vertigo.
From the first lines of this monologue that maintains, in less than a hundred pages, an electrifying state of tension, we know the voice of the narrator. He is a writer and fruit grower, he lives in a country without a name, in a time impossible to locate. Like RimbaudA season in hell (1873), this extreme character, who we would be tempted to identify with an evil double of Peter Handke, is about to tell us the story of one of his follies. “Out of the house (…) It was considered a fact that he was possessed, not by one, but by several, innumerable demons.explains.
terrible memories
This town crazy guy, who could have escaped from the movie. Orderby Carl Theodor Dreyer (1955), he does not remember that crazy time, when he abandoned the family home and pitched his tent in an old cemetery. What he says, with a rage that recalls the scandalous irritation of another Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), is taken from the terrible memories he left in the memory of his community. “What came out of me: insults and harangues always, and always new, other, and always unheard of (…). »
Peter Handke does not explore his character’s madness through a psychological lens. through this “devil” of language, what questions is the entire symbolic dimension of writing. Those who commit themselves run the risk of getting lost in the abyss, but they can also remake the world to find their place in it. “The writing woke me up and showed me on the threshold, just as I was.”the narrator confides. For Handke, literature is a double-edged experience. And, as often happens in his stories, terror ends up giving way to sweetness. During a strange boat trip from one country to another, his character miraculously returns to himself, thanks to his gaze. “attractive, friendly” from a stranger In this magnificent epilogue, the visible world opens before him again, through a succession of sensations that he welcomes without running the risk of finding a name for them. Amaury da Cunha
