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It is tempting to divine the title of Peter Handke’s latest novel, The Ballad of the Last Guest, as the cryptic rejoinder of a writer dubbed “The Bob Dylan of genocide apologists” after controversially winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, bestowing such an award on the Austrian writer after his outspoken support for Serbia during the 1990s Yugoslav wars — including delivering a eulogy at the 2006 funeral of Slobodan Milošević — called the legitimacy of the whole Nobel project into question.
But when hasn’t Handke, now 83, leaned into provocation to bolster his anti-establishment bona fides? Even as a fledgling writer he was lambasting literary giants such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass for what he described as their “descriptive impotence”. This speech, which he delivered at Princeton University in 1966 during a meeting of the German literary association Gruppe 47, has gone down in history as the moment that Handke first grasped the finer points of épater la bourgeoisie as a career advancement strategy.
All of this would not be worth mentioning if Handke wasn’t a supremely gifted writer whose existential acuteness in novels such as The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970) and Repetition (1986) can be set alongside Kafka and Camus. The Ballad of the Last Guest, expertly translated by Krishna Winston, conjures the spirit of both writers: Handke’s protagonist Gregor Werfer shares his first name with the hero of Metamorphosis; while Gregor’s reaction to learning news of his younger brother Hans’s sudden demise shares similar signs of the emotional detachment Meursault exhibits on learning of his mother’s death in The Stranger.
In Handke’s novel, Gregor, an inhabitant of a “foreign continent” for more than 20 years, returns home (somewhere in Europe, though it is never named) to spend a week of “silence” with his sister and their elderly parents. On his way there, he receives a text telling him that his younger brother, Hans, has died in the tropics fighting for the Foreign Legion. This echoes a true story Handke recounted in his Nobel speech: his uncle Gregor, returning on leave in 1943, bumped into the very man charged with delivering news of his brother’s battlefield death. The two Gregors, both real and fictional, keep the secret from their families until the very end of their stay.
Handke describes his fictional Gregor’s occupation as a chronicler who embarks on “one-man expeditions” — a phrase of monumental cant he also used in his Nobel speech to describe himself. This deliberate fuzziness is of a piece with Handke seemingly taking great delight in not being explicit about place names, branding, occupations, the names of artists whose paintings he mentions, or anything else that is generated outside of his own hermetic universe.
Just as Handke’s first novel, The Hornets (1966), featured a blind protagonist, in The Ballad of the Last Guest he makes Gregor a one-eyed man who believes he can see deeper than anyone else: “Being a chronicler of the adventures of one gone astray, whose voluntary and systematic lostness was again not paradoxical, being that kind of chronicler, sharing these experiences, yes, but purely as a chronicler: that was what he viewed as his calling.”
On the surface this kind of preciousness and Gregor’s habitual need for self-aggrandisement seems like little more than existentialist angst masquerading as serious literature. Thankfully, there is a point to it all, as Handke is staging an outrageous joke: the one-eyed Gregor gradually reveals himself to be a Victor Meldrew-esque curmudgeon. He storms out of a cinema shouting “down with democracy” after his prudishness is offended by what is on the screen; later, after spending the night in a forest communing with nature, he becomes inexplicably fearful and bolts for the nearest town. “No forest ever again!” he cries. “Where can they be found nowadays, the inexplicable, delightful, fairytale beauties, those thingamajigs, pure and unadulterated, from the forests of yore?”
What emerges in the book’s final pages is the brutally honest portrait of a specific kind of intellectual isolation. Gregor spends his last days in and around his village intent on avoiding his family at all costs; his evenings are spent in a state of semi-rhapsody, as he commends himself on being the “last guest” to leave a series of country taverns.
His infuriating smugness about matters such as being the first and only member of his “clan” to have learnt how to swim become laugh-out-loud evidence of a floundering narcissist. At the final count there is also a certain pathos that proves genuinely moving when Gregor finally descends from his ivory tower and acknowledges to himself and his sister the grief he feels at his brother’s loss.
Articulacy and the rules of correct grammar have been banished, only a clumsy wish that can never be fulfilled remains: “YOU WILL GO AND RETURN NOT DIE IN THE WAR.” The capital letters denoting a primal scream are Handke’s ode to a man who has finally woken up to pain.
The Ballad of the Last Guest by Peter Handke, translated by Krishna Winston Farrar, Straus and Giroux £22.99/$26, 176 pages
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