Last December, just four days before Peter Handke’s 83rd birthday, his short novel The Ballad of the Last Guest was published in English. (The original, in German, was published in 2023.) To my knowledge, only one other American publication, World Literature Today, has reviewed it. (There were a handful of prepublication notices, in Publishers Weekly and the like.) On the back cover of the English edition, there’s a bit from John Updike, taken from an old piece in the New Yorker: “The best writer altogether, in his language.” High praise, and that was written before Handke quite justifiably received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019.
Ah, that Nobel Prize. You may recall that as soon as the award was announced, a torrent of denunciation poured forth, almost as if it had been prepared in advance, just in case. Handke, we were told, in terms brooking no dissent, was an unrepentant supporter of genocide (not mere persecution — bad enough — but genocide) against Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia.
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