Peter Handke’s The Left-handed Woman grew out of a film script he wrote (the film appeared under the same title) and the novel’s technique is very filmic. There is no narrator going inside the characters to tell us what they are thinking or feeling. Apart from the husband, the main characters are simply referred to as ‘the woman’, ‘the child’, ‘the teacher’, and we only know their names from when they talk to each other. Everything and everyone is seen from outside in a very visual manner, the author acting like a film director shifting his camera from shot to shot. What guides the reader’s experience of the characters and events is the literary equivalent of the camera angle, the light in which the figures are shown, the parallels and contrasts, the repeated motifs. The overall effect of this technique is to create a central character who is mysteriously self-contained and through this exerts a fascination on the reader.

Marianne (‘the woman’) and Bruno spend the night after he returns from a business trip in a nearby hotel. The following morning, suddenly and without explanation, she asks him to leave her. He does, and moves in with her friend, the feminist and woman’s group organiser, Franziska. The story then follows the minor events of her day-to-day existence — shopping, collecting her child from school, having coffee with Franziska, working as a translator — in what appears to be a downward spiral of depression. This reaches its lowest point in a trip to the town with her son when the ordinary features of city life — the lights, the noise, the traffic, other people — gradually intensify and merge into a nightmare.

From then on Marianne seems to regain control over herself and her life, in particular retaining her independence of other people, all of whom seem to want something from her, although it is often disguised as the offer of help. Bruno offers her money; her publisher, as soon as he hears she has thrown her husband out, appears at the door with flowers and a bottle of champagne; an out-of-work actor falls in love with her just from seeing her in a café; Franziska wants her to join the women’s group as an example of a woman who has ‘woken up’.

The novel is very carefully structured, with similarities to a musical composition, and the final scene brings all the figures together in an impromptu party as they turn up unannounced at Marianne’s house. The scene becomes noisier and noisier and more and more chaotic, as the various characters interact with each other. The only exception is Marianne, who is a calm at the centre of the bedlam. When everyone has left she can say to her reflection in the mirror, «You have not betrayed yourself. And no one will humiliate you again.» The final coda, the final visual ‘comment’, is a picture of Marianne, alone, sitting in her rocking chair looking out of the window.

The way Handke concentrates — on externals and allows his central character to be herself is the major factor in the effectiveness of this portrait of a woman who succeeds in asserting her independence. M M

In this bleak but brilliant book Handke puts some everyday souls under the microscope. It’s an operation done with Teutonic precision; there’s something of the same disillusioned stare as in the cinema of Fassbinder or Wim Wenders (before he got religion).

There’s a wonderfully acid vision of the city of market progress most of us are forced to live in where ‘The roar of the traffic was so loud that a long-lasting catastrophe seemed to be in progress’.

In this world, deliberately modern, of executive housing estates and shopping malls — the instant utopia of consumerism — a woman chooses solitude (self-knowledge?) over her officially-sanctioned state of married-with-one-kid bliss. Is it because she has seen herself like this; ‘you lounge around your tidy homes like narcissistic photos of yourselves’. For whatever reason she makes her journey out of her ‘major relationship’ because ‘Everything seems so banal with people around’.

Perhaps Handke is rather obviously projecting his own vision onto his female protagonist, his feeling of cold compassion towards ultramodern suburban lives in a country where a citizen can think ‘he himself had no image of his native land’. This seems to be the flattened historical perspective of the contemporary Austrian, unable and unwilling to face up to a criminal past and so prone to exist in the perfect vacuum of a Fake America of supermarkets and tract houses... One of the most celebrated postwar Austrian novels.

‘She sat rigid in the living room while the child and his fat friend jumped from a chair onto a pile of pillows, singing at the top of their voices: «The shit jumps on the piss, and the piss jumps on the shit, and the shit jumps on the piss...» They screeched and writhed with laughter, whispered into each other’s ears, looked at the woman, pointed at her, and laughed some more. They didn’t stop and they didn’t stop; the woman did not react.

She sat at her typewriter. The child came up on tiptoes and leaned against her. She pushed him away with her shoulder, but he kept standing beside her. Suddenly the woman pulled him close and grabbed him by the throat; she shook him, let him go, and averted her eyes.

At night the woman sat at the desk; something rose slowly from the lower edge of her eyes and made them glisten; she was crying, without a sound, without a movement’ p46