Controversial Nobel laureate Peter Handke's novel The Ballad of the Last Guest is a slim, elegant mood piece, intended more to evoke feelings and emotions than to tell a conventional story. Anyone willing to surrender to its melancholy sensibility on those terms will be rewarded with a meaningful reading experience.
Gregor Werfer returns to his childhood home for a weeklong visit highlighted by the baptism of his younger sister's baby boy, his godchild. But even as he rejoins his family, he's burdened by his knowledge of a terrible secret. Unbeknownst to his parents and sister, their son and brother Hans, serving in the Foreign Legion of an unnamed country, has been killed by an enemy bullet, his body buried immediately in the tropical country where he was fighting. But instead of unburdening himself of his grief to his family, Gregor abandons them to embark on a restless, solitary odyssey through the environs of New Town. A veteran of what he calls "my one-man expeditions," he's a keen observer of his shifting surroundings by day, while he spends his nights in a trolley barn, a forest, an unused village church, and an assortment of welcoming taverns where he earns his eponymous title.
Handke creates a world infused with intense sensory detail while fully inhabiting Gregor's psyche, as the enigmatic character confronts memory and loss. The Ballad of the Last Guest is saturated with a reflective spirit. In the final section, Gregor primarily summons up a generous sampling of striking images drawn from all that has gone before. It's a fitting conclusion to an impressionistic novel that casts a memorable spell. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer