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, an isolated man who "longed, even yearned, to be seen, and more than merely seen: to be recognized," and who thinks of himself as "a chronicler of the adventures of one gone astray," 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. Gregor's relationship with his younger sibling had never been an easy one, and in the first section of this triptych work, Handke (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) reveals how the brothers, on a joint expedition before Hans's departure to his military mission, at least had experienced the quiet satisfaction of "finding each other again after all those years of estrangement."
But instead of unburdening himself of his grief to his family, Gregor, clad in a suit and an expensive new fall coat, and haunted by "business to settle with myself," abandons them to embark on a restless, solitary odyssey through the environs of New Town, the rapidly urbanizing "agglomeration" that's replacing much of the rural environment of his youth. 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. In a narrative that swings effortlessly from third- to first-person, Handke creates a world infused with intense sensory detail while fully inhabiting Gregor's psyche, as the enigmatic character acknowledges "roaming aimlessly, yes, but by my own choice," confronting memory and loss.
The Ballad of the Last Guest is saturated with a reflective spirit. Its final section amounts to a brief coda, in which he 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
Shelf Talker: In this memorable, impressionistic novel, a man returns to his hometown for a family visit amid a changed landscape, seeking solace for a profound loss.