There is something really appealing about this book, about the style of Handke’s writing and Winston’s translation. The story is at once straightforward and surreal, and from the very first page everything’s shifty, unreliable, the story casting doubt on itself. Here’s how the book starts: “Don Juan had always been looking for someone to listen to him. Then one fine day he found me. He told me his story, but in the third person rather than in the first. At least that is how I recall it now” (p 3). Wait: is that how it happened, or is that just how the narrator remembers it? Isn’t that always the question? As the story progresses, this shiftiness continues: the narrator keeps on making statements and then pulling back from them or revising them, and Don Juan himself sometimes does the same thing. Here’s the narrator: “If anyone would have looked good on a horse, it was he—but perhaps not, after all” (p 19). And here’s the narrator talking about Don Juan telling part of his story: “As he turned to leave, he stepped on a fallen branch, and the couple became aware of him. He corrected himself: rather than the sound of cracking wood it was his sighing, the listener’s sighing, that startled the two of them” (p 23).
Our narrator is an innkeeper and a chef in the Île-de-France, though not a successful one. In fact, he seems to have failed completely at his business, and is a bit defensive about it. He talks about how when Don Juan appeared he was cooking just for himself, “for the time being,” how he was using some of the guest rooms as his own rooms “just then,” how he has no neighbors—but that’s not his fault (ibid.). Over the next few pages, though, it becomes clear he’s letting his inn and grounds go wild around him: he’s stopped really gardening, he’s kept a breach in the wall unmended, he hasn’t been mowing the lawn, and he’s piled his lawn furniture in a corner to rot. He’s been busy reading, though right before Don Juan arrives, he’s decided he’s had enough of that, too. So he’s done with books, but here’s Don Juan, a character from them, appearing suddenly in his yard. “Don Juan’s coming on that May afternoon took the place of reading for me. It was more than a mere substitution,” he says, and goes on: “Don Juan’s arrival literally offered me the sense of a widening of my inner horizons, of bursting boundaries, that I usually experienced only from reading, from excited (and exciting), blissful reading” (p 5).
Our narrator’s been a bit stuck, all alone in his inn, but Don Juan catapults through the breach in the wall, bringing motion and connection and stories of the world. Which is good, but it’s all a bit strange. The narrator isn’t sure how he knows it’s Don Juan, he just knows; he’s not sure what language they speak together, or how to make sense of much that surrounds Don Juan’s arrival. He’s pursued by a couple on a motorcycle but the couple seem to have decided he’s not the person they’re looking for after all. He moves backward but doesn’t seem especially vigilant. He’s been on the run but somehow pulls wild garlic and sorrel and mushrooms from his pockets, all cleaned and ready for cooking. And let’s not forget the very strangeness of his presence at all: a fictional character from centuries ago has, all of a sudden, appeared in our narrator’s yard. Don Juan seems to know of his own status as a character, if our narrator is at all to be believed: “I should consider him as real as anything could be, he told me, and he snapped shut the switchblade in his hand” (p 10).
Don Juan, or this Don Juan, is preternaturally in touch with the natural world: he’s managed to find the aforementioned mushrooms and sorrel and garlic even as he’s fleeing at top speed from his pursuers; a cat and several butterflies seem drawn to him, a muskrat and two crows also stop by to visit. But he isn’t, or hasn’t been, the seducer we’re expecting. He hadn’t even been talking to women for years, though all that changed a week before he arrived in the narrator’s garden. He stays with the narrator for a week (and then a bit more), and each day of that first week he tells the story of that day the week before: each day a different city, a different woman: how Don Juan got his groove back, as it were, though the narrator takes pains to explain that Don Juan’s never been a seducer, or seduced, that it’s something else entirely. As Don Juan tells his stories, there’s a lot about attraction/desire (though not in any conventional way you would expect) but also about time, slippages of time, time being changed for the two people in an affair, time being synchronized for those two people in a way it isn’t normally. All this was interesting, but I was more interested in the storytelling/reading/listening themes, though I guess stories themselves have a lot to do with slippages of time: how narrative can be told out of order, how time can feel slowed down or sped up in the telling of an experience, as well as in the living of it.
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