The Ballad of the Last Guest

Gregor Werfer, the one-eyed protagonist of this perceptive if ponderous outing from Nobel winner Handke (The Second Sword), reflects on mortality and the passage of time during a visit to his childhood home. Urban sprawl has taken over the formerly rural setting in an unspecified country, and a neighbor’s house is now “barely an arm’s length” from Gregor’s family’s courtyard. To avoid spoiling his visit, he withholds from his parents and younger sister the devastating news that his younger brother, Hans, has been killed in battle. Handke doesn’t explain why the others don’t get the news, and Gregor soon avoids them, spending the night in a nearby forest and in several taverns while reflecting on his relationship with Hans, what kind of godfather he will be to his sister’s out-of-wedlock infant, the benefits of being the last guest in a restaurant, and the local townspeople (“They had sorrow, unmitigated sorrow, they were in mourning for something or other; they had a disability, whether visible or not, were haunted—day in, day out—by fear of death”). The result is a dense and thorough exploration of one man’s grappling with change and loss (“Do I live on what reveals itself only in retrospect?”). It’s enlightening and exasperating in equal measure. (Dec.)