Anyone who has seen Wim Wender's "Heaven over Berlin" (1987), with a patient Bruno Ganz as a deafening angel in a black and white Berlin, will not forget it. The poetic dialogue is written by Austrian Peter Handke: a text completely fearless for the seriousness of the vulnerability. It is probably this seriousness that can make some people call it self-solemn pecoros. The same dense style is found in Peter Handke's 80s novels that were so significant during the same decade in Sweden.
Translated by Margareta Holmqvist (with the habit of translating Nobel laureates such as Heinrich Böll, Nelly Sachs, Elfriede Jelinek), with beautiful laconic titles and covers by Gunnar Falk, they incarnated an attitude to literature that was full of confidence to its importance.
"Slow Homecoming" (1981), "Absence" (1989) and the almost aphoristic "Thoughts on Fatigue" (1991), a fine book to meet author Peter Handke in when he talks about bad and good fatigue, fatigue to fear, feel debt over, forced to work in.
And "Children's Story" (1984) about a man who has been left by his wife and lives alone with his child. Here you will find school yards, kitchen enamel, grilling scenes and landscapes that reflect a minute sequence of spiritual development. That Karl-Ove Knausgård claims to have had Handke in the shelf of inspiration when he started his autofictional Min Kamp, understands the delirium in the story of the child and the man in the world, even though Handke's prose has a cooler tone, a deeper foreignness.
After that, I stopped reading Peter Handke, whose novels became thicker and politically disparaging in a Europe that broke down in the Balkan War in the 1990s. It was a sadness that felt worse than growing away from a writerhood that few talked about anymore. I was in the company of many convinced that Handke would be impossible to praise by an academy with a sense of the power of the word right here and now, at a time when historical revisionism, factual contempt and nationalism are poisoning Europe again.
The writer Olga Tokarczuk is, beyond the person as a fighting human rights activist forced upon her by Polish right-wing nationalists, a postmodern narrator. She merges fragments of pasties in a style with both realistic authority and aesthetic dressage.
When she was praised for the bragdepos "Jakobsböckerna" (2015), translated by Jan-Henrik Swahn who has carried her authorship in Swedish since the beginning of the 2000s, she said in live TV that Poland has to face itself with its history and close its eyes. for crimes such as the extermination of the Jews, and at one moment became controversial and threatened.
Her work indirectly serves as source research for soil, blood and borders as the European memory. History not as a heroic monolith, but a continual examination of human life in the shadow of power, where the distraught penetrates into the light. Haunting with black humor.
Borders, inner and outer, goes again in essays collections such as "The Bear's Moment" (2014), a novel about a crime that "Controls your plow over the legs of the dead" (2010) and the breakthrough novel "Daghus, natthus" (2005) - a novel built of fragments and dream logic, a suggestive story about the hometown of southwestern Poland.
Strategically, it was certainly the decision to award the 2018 reserved prize to Olga Tokarczuk, which enabled this year's prize to be awarded to Handke. We find ourselves in the inevitable situation that we now read and talk about two authorship at once - and talk about the one person whose political shame is indirectly apologized for by the prize, and the other's literature and vulnerability to anti-democratic forces may be protected by the same prize - for such is the effect.
Something to look forward to reading is the authors' Nobel lectures in December. Two, to say the least, loaded contemporary comments.