Why is it I have come to read more and more slowly? Why, having passed through spring, summer and autumn of the book, do I pass so slowly through winter? Because when we part ways I will part from myself; because the end of the book is the end of the steering of the book, the stars it placed in the sky above me. I would rather have them, the stars, than nothing. By your strong prose was I borne. By the turning of full pages was I carried. I will read more slowly, as I come to the end.
Why did it only occur to me yesterday to check the date of publication? 1993. The book was written in 1993, and not in the 1999 in which it was set. 1993, and not the time of civil war and the breakdown of Europe of its 1999. As in his last book, the writer had written a fantasy; he felt it necessary to remove the book from the present and set it elsewhere. And 1999 is not any time; it is the turning of the millennium, the brink of the old and the beginning of the new. The beginning, perhaps, of the transformation of which the narrator tells us on the first extraordinary pages of the book he will relate.
Doesn’t he always promise to narrate transformation, this author? And isn’t it always that the book is perpetually held at that moment, at the threshold of transformation? This is why the blurb on the back of his books is always inaccurate. No one of his pages is more important than any other; the story always hovers at the turning point; it is held in transformation, the world is perpetually carried to the brink of itself.
I admit it, there were many boring pages. How difficult it was, around page 300, when, after the stories of the 7 wanderers, we were made to return to the narrator’s own daily recounting, the chronicle of the minutiae of the ‘no man’s bay’! At that moment, I thought: the book is definitely not The Book; the author has slipped up – these are too many pages, and the narrative is like the river that runs into a swamp and is lost there.
How unbearable dull, these pages! And yet how many passages I marked with my pencil! How these passages grow in the memory! The bee’s nest in the cliff face; the stagnant old pond; the narrator’s noisy neighbours and the troops who pass everywhere; the paths that he names and the immigrant workers whom he greets; and finally, at the end, the restaurant of ladders where the narrator meets his son: I will return to them, these passages, and that will be how I will know the book, only in retrospect – only as it streams behind me, like the tail of a comet. Pain that I will only be carried backward by my memory, and not forward, in the forward sweep of reading! Pain that I will not know the innocence of going forward!
How many pages are there left? It is cold today and I am holed up in the flat, curtains drawn, gas fire on. How cold it is! The book is on the floor, with me. I sit at my desk, and the book is open, with a pencil along its centre, resting on the floor. And it is though, as it waits, that it projects a heaven above my small room and that it is the room’s hearth.
My Year in No Man’s Bay: by revealing the title, have I not betrayed the book? The Book, perhaps, but not this, its substitute. I can name it now, as I can name its author: Peter Handke and I am betraying nothing. When will it be 1999? When will it come, the turning of the millennium, the Book on whose pages I will read of the new world? ‘How long did it take you to finish the book?’ – ‘A few weeks’. – ‘How long did it take you?’ – ‘I read with my life, with the whole of my life’.
Lars Iyer's Blog 