39 Books: 2004

Bought for an eye-watering £13 in the LRB Bookshop three months before this blog began, Once Again for Thucydides is another example in this series of how a book of under 100 pages can be worth as much as any number of maximalist breeze blocks.

But do I really want to make such claims? Literature is not a cattle auction. If I leave the paragraph untouched, it is to let us sense in it the essential lack in the literary experience.

In what was Yugoslavia, a traveller stays in a hotel on the edge of a sink-hole "at the foot of which, Dante is said to have entered into the Inferno". Over eight pages, he describes his surroundings: the light, the noises, the architecture, people milling about a railway station, the natural landscape, with particular attention given to birds:

In the alley leading down to the sink-hole was a rooster with a glowworm in its beak. I freed the glowworm which sat stunned a while before finally raising its head. In a garden near the hole, a turkey in a wire cage raised its head in the same way. Then, finally, near the sea on this Sunday evening, a palm frond suddered like a thousand birds.       [Translated by Tess Lewis]

Another chapter focuses on the work of an elderly shoeshiner in Split, another notes the variety of hats worn by passers-by in Skopje. In Epopee of Loading a Cargo Ship there are four pages describing passengers and cargo waiting on the quayside in the hour before a ferry leaves Dubrovnik: "It was the setting for a Hamsun novel" the traveller says: "But how much more beautiful, real, and expansive that the scenery should unfold over the hour without being contained in a novel." Indeed. An epopee is an epic poem. Hence Thucydides; epics of the everyday.

If, as Blanchot says, Proust came to think of his novel as having the essence of a sphere engorged with the impurities of "novelistic density" in which the famous instants pass from the centre to the surface to reveal pure time in "joyful flashes of lightning", Handke removes the density and in doing so exposes us to a time outside of the human, to which we are nevertheless subject. Reading Once Again for Thucydides, the circumference of the sphere begins to dissolve.