BOOK FORUM REVIEW OF MORAVIAN NIGHT .. opening & link

http://www.bookforum.com/review/18222#reply

Peter Handke is an acclaimed and prolific author of novels, plays, essays, and poems. A cultural icon of postwar Germany and Austria, he garnered an early reputation as a provocateur with works like Offending the Audience (1966) and Self-Accusation (1966). Handke was internationally acclaimed as a gifted prose stylist, with ruminative, extended sentences that had what John Updike called a “knifelike clarity of evocation.” Later in his career, Handke became embroiled in controversy as he became an outspoken supporter of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars, downplayed the fact that Serbian paramilitaries committed genocide during the conflict, and spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia who had been on trial for war crimes. Handke voiced his support for Serbia as the last bastion of an idealized Yugoslavia in A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (1997), a polemical travelogue in which Handke denounced the “evil facts” of Western news media during the Yugoslav wars and presented blinkered and quixotic views of Serbian life. His scant references to high-profile atrocities—particularly the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995—provoked a vehement outcry that continues to this day. He became an outcast in European intellectual circles, depicting bucolic scenes in a country isolated by sanctions.

http://www.bookforum.com/review/18222#reply

SUMMARY NOTICE 4 MONTHS AFTER PUBLICATION

  

Herewith, a FINAL REPORT

http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2017/04/summary-notice-4-months-after.html

for and from   

http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/ 

Four months subsequent to official publication, on December 6, 2016, 6 month after review copies went out for MORAVIAN NIGHTS during which while

http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/04/moravian-discussion-index.html​

has accumulated appr. 20 k “hits” - a penny a hit would be pittance recompense for the time spent on the project, yet I have the immense pleasures of a month’s indulgent involvement in the riches of this text! But one interlocutor, fellow Handke translator, Scott Abbott to share & get into a few scraps with. The # 20 k for a six month period compares with about half a million for the entire complex of Handke sites that is now about a decade old

*http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-hub-navel-to-todos-handke.html/magazin.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-hub-navel-to-todos-handke.html/>

and grew out of the handke.scriptmania complex and its dozen subsites: 

http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/



Now the report on MORAVIAN NIGHT’S fate among U>S> reviewers which confirms that the catastrophic reception persists:

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2010/07/catastrophic-handke-reception-in-united.html



http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2015/04/peter-handke-ny-times-50-year-horror.html



http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2009/12/letter-to-robert-silvers-ny-review-of.html



 http://www.handke-nobel.scriptmania.com/rich_text.html

=====


Since review copies went out  there have of course been the usual kind-hearted, innocuous pre-reviews @ Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly and the like which repeat the publisher’s jackett copy siren calls, and I have duly posted these as well. For overall comparison, the MORAVIAN NIGHT site contains a collection of German, French, Italian & Spanish reviews.



Udderwise, there have been but two drivelings from two of the remaining major teats, two ideological human rights hyenas screams, two dumb vacas, who are evidently unable to, or averse digest Handke’s rich offerering - a difficult job, for sure - and evade into moral positioning and refuse to represent or give as much as a hint of the multifarious matters that sleight of hand artist Handke performs in Moravian Night,





http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/decimating.html

===

​http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/02/09/peter-handke-stranger-in-love/

===

http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2016/04/moravian-discussion-index.html

Tanja Angela Kunz (Berlin)

Die Kehrseite der Wiederholung – Weiblichkeit, Gewalt und Erzählen in Peter Handkes Die morawische Nacht

http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin70/p70t5.htm ====

I have little to add to my decimation of Kirschensaft, it is actually an event that the NYRB published Scott Abbott’s letter to the editor:

NYRB/ KIRSCH REPLY TO SCOTT ABBOTT'S TAKE-DOWN OF IDEOLOGICAL HACK KARSCH http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/nyrb-reply-to-scott-abbotts-take-down.html



and upon Bob Silvers passing I posted a note on our relationship which came a cropper due to his I think then criminal mis-treatment of Handke’s texts and plays: 

http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-comment-on-nyrb-robert-silvers.html

 And so once again we do not have a fruitful discussion, except between Scott Abbott and myself, where matters got quite heated a they tend to even among those who have drawn on these riches and are favorably disposed!  My falling out with Hagiographer Lothar Struck upon MORVIAN’S publication in Krautland 10 years ago has still not been resolved! 

Having sought for some years to lay the basis for a more complex reception, I am chagrined that The New Yorker merely ran a notice and that my eforts failed to induce James Wood, David Bromwich, Michael Dirda and the few others whom I regard as worthy of the task to take the considerable trouble that it takes to do justice to MORAVIAN NIGHT by situating it within Handke’s overall oeuvre & life.

  Alas, the kultchur, an old whore... I read Mauberly in my senior college year:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44915

and he was right back then, 60 years ago. To do justice to MORAVIAN NIGHT entails more than just putting on your thunking cup, but acquaintance with a fair amount of Handke’s other work, and lots of that - the diary volumes - have gone missing, as have the significant books on Yugoslavia in this country, MORAVIAN has more dimensions than the Balkans, or does it?

 U.S. theater, after an initial reception, has refused to mature with Handke. It had not been an object of life to get at the roots of squareness and provinciality in Los Estados Unidos Norte, but then I found it in Seattle, which, in other respects, compares favorably.

http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/04/seattle-uconducive-to-artistic.html

 T’would have been nice if other voices had weighed in, perhaps some will yet. Missing in particular - as usual I feel like saying - is input response from the Germ departements, about 100 of which I alerted to the imminence of the publication of this major book in translation. More than ever before I feel that you could take these colonial outposts and transplant them on Mars for the difference their absence would make in university and national life - the library ctd. to buy the Handke titles, no one has been reading them for decades. Here a link to what is taught here, at the U.Dub. the University of Washington, of sports fame and infamy, of a first rate Medical School, the there Germ department supposedly a stellar colonial outposts in the USA:



https://germanics.washington.edu/news/categories/program-innovation

Grumpily yrs,  Mauberly II

response to reviews

After the New York Review of Books published an aggressively idiotic review of The Moravian Night, I sent a letter to the editor. It has been ignored.

So I publish it here.

29 January 2017

Dear Editor,

Adam Kirsch’s review of Peter Handke’s “The Moravian Night” (like Joshua Cohen’s review of the novel in The New York Times) rightfully relates it to Handke’s previous work set in the former Yugoslavia, but (like Cohen) Kirsch is so obsessed with reading through that lens that he pays scant attention to other aspects of the novel at hand.

Kirsch’s case against an author he describes as a self-righteous, obstinate, proud nationalist and as an anti-Semitic Serb lover leads him to misread a scene at a world convention of Jew’s harp players during which each musician plays his or her national anthem. Because he wants to brand Handke as a nationalist, Kirsch doesn’t quote the rest of section in which the performances of national anthems raise the protagonist’s ire: “abusing the jew’s-harp to play mendacious harmonies: that was impermissible”; the national anthems are a kind of “melodic demagoguery.”

Kirsch marshals his case with great certainty, claiming that Handke defends Austrians and Germans and Serbs as “great peoples” scorned by others for their war crimes. Because Handke works dialectically, critics like Kirsch easily find objectionable statements in his work. That they settle on the problematic statements without the dialectical context marks them as ideologues rather than readers. “Austria,” Handke once wrote of the land Kirsch claims he promotes at all costs, “the lard that chokes me.” Critics who don’t have the patience or capacity to read give me that same feeling.

Scott Abbott

Translator of Peter Handke’s Journey to the Rivers, Voyage by Dugout, and To Duration

MORAVIAN-NIGHTS-DISCUSSION: ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS

MORAVIAN-NIGHTS-DISCUSSION: ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-moravian-night/

MORAVIAN-NIGHTS-DISCUSSION: ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS

MORAVIAN-NIGHTS-Dhttp://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/p/decimating.htmlISCUSSION: ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEWS

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 FEBRUARY 13 & 20, 2017 ISSUE

BRIEFLY NOTED

“ 

THE MORAVIAN NIGHT, by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Watson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The protagonist of this novel about storytelling is a retired writer, who, returning from an expedition across Europe, summons friends to his houseboat, in Serbia (the title of the book is the boat’s name), to hear an all-night retelling of his tour. With allusions to “The Arabian Nights,” Cervantes, and Chaucer, his tale weaves memory, dream, philosophy, and illusion. Locations, names, and relationships are often left to the imagination, but there is a persistent sense that “momentous things must have occurred, and apparently almost every minute.” The theme of the book is self-examination, and the way that our lives are shaped by the land beneath our feet.

here yet another uncomprhending review 
http://www.runspotrun.com/book-reviews/moravian-night-peter-handke/