Volume 24, Number 11 · June 23, 1977
Play It Again, Franz
By Michael Wood
Nonsense and Happiness
by Peter Handke, translated by Michael Roloff
Urizen Books, 93 pp., $3.95 (paper)
A Moment of True Feeling
by Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pp., $8.95
Three by Peter Handke
by Peter Handke
Avon Books, 298 pp., $2.25 (paper)
We have heard a good deal, from Thomas Mann as well as from John Barth and Harold Bloom, about the lateness of the modern artist, and no doubt the sensible response to such a proposition is to ask who is holding the watch. Who sets the time for these feasts or lessons or performances which are always ending just when our representatives arrive? But there is a form of lateness which is familiar to us all. It is possible, for example, to fall in love and find the language you need already in use, shabby and dog-eared from misapplication, and there is a celebrated passage in Madame Bovary where Flaubert, irritated by a character who doesn't understand that clichés may reflect the most passionate sincerity, allows himself the sort of complaint we normally see only in his letters:
Review, 2821 words
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