Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke: Flight Makers

After last year’s controversy, when no Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, the Swedish Academy, which is responsible for the prize, needed to salvage its reputation and cement its credibility. TheOctober 10th announcement —that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 has been awarded to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and that the 2019 prize has gone to the Austrian Peter Handke—highlights the importance and necessity of the prize. While accusations of the prize being Eurocentric (a majority of laureates have been European, Sweden has received more prizes than all of Asia) will rightly persist, only malcontents will question the merit and worthiness of Tokarczuk and Handke.

Fifty-seven-year-old Tokarczuk is a celebrity in Poland, where she attracts young and old liberals with her straight talk in support of a tolerant and diverse society, which eschews borders and fences. She came into the international limelight in 2018, when she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft). The novel was hailed for the way it brought together 21st-century travel and human anatomy. It spanned centuries and anecdotes, moving from the real story of Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen who discovered the Achilles tendon, to Chopin’s heart travelling in a jar below his sister’s skirt. It then chronicles the journey of a Polish woman who had emigrated to New Zealand but returns to Poland to aid a terminally ill high-school sweetheart, in a rather macabre way. Tokarczuk’s writing, like that of her country’s history, is fragmentary. It works in circles and spires, rather than straight lines. She has herself described Flights as “constellation novel”.

Tokarczuk, who is easily identifiable with her untamed dreadlocks, is known to speak truth to power. Her 2009 novel, which was translated (into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) and released this year as Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is an eco-feminist novel. It uses a murder mystery to tell of animal rights and environmental concerns. ‘What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm?’ the novel’s narrator Duszejko asks.

‘What on earth is wrong with us?’ That is the question Tokarczuk, a long-time vegetarian, activist and public intellectual, wants readers to ask themselves. If Tokarczuk’s work is constellation-like, then Handke’s oeuvre is a constellation in itself, because of its sheer range. As the Nobel Prize notes in its biography of Handke, for more than 50 years, he has ‘produced a great numbers of works in different genres. He has established himself as one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War. His bibliography ontains novels, essays, note books, dramatic works and screenplays.’ John Updike described him as the finest writer in Germany, reported The Guardian in 1999. His work in German is marked by a keen observation and sensitivity to the world around him. As he has often said, the most
important attribute is “to be receptive to everything.”

The leitmotif in his works shows us how everydayness can be deadening, and madness and irrationality lurk below all polite and not-so-polite surfaces. The 76-year-old author first came to attention with his avant-garde play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966), where the actors on stage do just that—insult the audience and extol their own performance. His plays came to be celebrated for their lack of conventional plot or dialogue.

Handke’s novels similarly are anything but conventional, taking simple premises to their extreme. One of his best known novels, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1970) brings together a regular American ‘hard-boiled criminal story’ with European modernist sensibilities. A former football player commits a murder, and then waits for the police to do their job. Wunschloses Unglück (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 1972) was a different work, being semiautobiographical, chronicling the life and death of
his mother. His later works Der grosse Fall (The Great Fall: A Story, 2011) tells of a day in the life of an aging actor as he plods through the length of a city.

But Handke’s career has not been without controversies. He relishes them as well, having rubbished the idols of German letters—Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Franz Kafka. He has been described as an apologist for far-right Serbian nationalism, given his writings about the Yugoslav Wars and his speech at Slobodan Miloševic’s funeral.

But the Nobel is a sign that he is being hailed as a writer of ‘the suburbs and the landscape’ as he ‘recaptures the unseen and makes us part of it.’

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About The Author

Nandini Nair

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