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Don Juan de la Mancha oder Die Erziehung der Lust
(Don Juan de la Mancha or The Education of Desire) enlarge image[ book tip by Incentives ] Don Juan is over the hill. All that he can now manage to do is look back at his life. Nathan has no desire anymore. And for the always groaning Viennese newspaper editor that is anything but a groan. But rather is to be understood in a thoroughly ambivalent way, that is: literally. Nathan is in his early fifties and is trapped in a professional and – for him even worse – sexual, i.e. existential, crisis. For him, life, just like his professional work for the ‘Life’ column of the high-society desk, is simply ridiculous.
On the couch of the psychotherapist Hannah Singer, the melancholy Don Juan goes back over his history and his stories: the affectionless childhood, the absent father, relationships that began full of hope and often ended early, in which desire rapidly ebbed away on both sides. A first marriage, which was only a short intermezzo. A second marriage, in which careers developed in opposite directions: Nathan’s wife climbed ever higher. Nathan began to drop out and was finally fired.
In the end, everything culminates in a ghostly erotic game with a lover, an exercise comprising desire and pain and an exchange of roles, as if it had been thought up by a James Ensor. Upon which, everything probably ends in an orderly fashion and can take a new, calmer direction. Candide has discovered his garden of life, Nathan has put the confusions of his life behind him.
On the second page there is a photograph, dating from the end of the 1970s. It shows a young, casual, fully bearded Robert Menasse, sitting surrounded by young women. Are we to equate Robert with Nathan? Of course not. Not a word of it is true, all of it has been made up. It is all fiction. Just a novel.
Translated by Peter Waugh
Original version: Alexander Kluy, Oktober 2008
[ book info ] Menasse, Robert: Don Juan de la Mancha oder Die Erziehung der Lust.
(Don Juan de la Mancha or The Education of Desire). (original language: Deutsch)
Suhrkamp Verlag,
Frankfurt, 2007
.
ISBN: 978-3-518-41910-6 .
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Comments Reverse chronology
[ 15.04.10 - 00:04 ] [ comment by michael roloff ] "A most remarkable prose poem that ought to be read at the rate it was written,
about three pages a day,"
Friedrich Nietzsche
handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com
DON JUAN REVIEW
(short version)
“By the way, he told me later, if one refrained from looking directly at a thing and instead just brushed it with a glance, the image could burn itself into one's retina in a way that no purposeful observation or contemplation could."
What a marvelous book! An aging reclusive restaurateur, gripped by the blues, dreams of an orgy, of the return to “womantime” – the erotic connection to the world and time and being seemingly forever: “I want a Bird” the dream begins, elicited by a pornographic fantasy; promptly “a sparrow” alights on a hazel stick lance, “Ich will vögeln” it says in dream language, and there he is: Don Juan! Through the “breach” in the wall.
There was a time that Handke belittled “magic realism” – from his customary envy I imagine – and here he is more magical than any of them in transposing his interiority, his libido, into a playful many layered… into a real mother****er of a book, oh and what dark sides this imagined Don has. - And not one single reviewer in the English language knows how to read! Don’t burn books, burn reviewers, don’t even bother putting them on a stake! Handke’s subsequent novel, the 2006 Kali is even more ambitious and an equally magical opera film – not that I haven’t half a dozen minor quarrels with Don Juan, oh and isn’t it ever so unfortunate that the second novel after Don Juan, the 2008 Moravian Nights, isn’t as multi-dimensionally composed as the formally so perfect Don Juan, a book that Thomas Mann would have envied! What reading experiences Handke continues to provide!...
ctd. 2: handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com
.MICHAEL ROLOFF
www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1
Member Seattle Psycho****ytic Institute and Society
This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
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"Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
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of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
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"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.
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