Handke has to get out of the house in Chaville near Paris to find the language and the images from which his works are created.
In order to stay in shape, he has to "practice the epic step, practice, practice, cross-country, cross-forest" every day.
This is what it says in his 500-page epic “Die Obstdiebin” from 2017. Its subtitle - “One way inland” - sounds like a utopia in times of lockdown and border closings.
Just go somewhere?
But not without a test and quarantine!
“I'm not a person in the house in the evening,” Handke told me when we spoke at the beginning of the pandemic.
He was depressed: "Terrible everything and so pointless." Since then I have called him again and again and was no less worried about his health than about his writing.