http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/2018/03/roloffs-review-of-alexia-fruit-thief.html
Alexia
In
“Alexia, Fruit Thief/Filcher”
Alexia
is presented as a vagabond – childhood escapee - who has been all over the
world – to lots of the same places that Peter Handke has been: Alaska, Detroit,
Spain - has Handke actually been to Siberia? She seems to be in her
mid-twenties just returned from Russia [not from Serbian rivers!!!] but has
haute bourgeois French parents - her motive for going to the Picardie is said
to be to look for her mother, the Bankieress from SIERRA DEL GREDOS…
but
Alexia is actually yet another of Handke’s surrogate wanderers Sorger, Loser, Kobal, Keuschnig, the Bankieress… what Kleinians
call a “part object” which differs from a projection – Handke’s most delightful
“part object” - and a slight one being that restaurateur in NO-MAN’S-BAY who
serves the world’s most delicious word-salad but keeps going broke and thus
keeps moving his joint ever deeper into the forest – as - judging by the sales
figures of his books and how rarely his plays are done in English - Handke would have to in this
country if he wanted to maintain his life style.
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/07/peter-handke-plays-in-english.html/
Part
objects of the amusing kind are rife in the play THEY ARE DYING OUT and signify
that Handke stands very much in the tradition of Austrian comic dramatists.
However,
Alexia - like Sorger and Loser - is not just a part but surrogate for her
creator’s senses, she or he do the seeing for him, and thus free Handke from
his notebooks and the autobiographical and allows his fantasy to roam. Thus,
Sorger’s profession of geological surveyor or Loser’s as archeologist I think
need to be understood as poetic rather than the activities of a professional.
Independent
of doing yeo-woman’s service as her creator’s magnificently observant eyes and
ears during his exploration of a stretch of the French country side – that is,
of being Handke’s surrogate personae – Alexia is odd indeed and anything but your
typical twenty-something all-around vagabond as which Handke tries to present
her. Alexia is first of all the reincarnation in female form of St.Alexius
but
the only thing she shares with him is a proclivity for hiding under stairs - we
do not see her begging or sharing alms, though she is frugal. More saintly she
becomes in the chaste dream that Handke provides her when she does not hook up
with her companion Valter, she may even be on her way to a nunnery and marriage
to Christ!
She is
into Eminem but apparently
not into any French singers, and she does not strike me as any kind of typical
twenty-something world explorer as which she might also have been portrayed.
She is said to have managed one semester at the University at Pointoise – Peter
Handke’s second daughter, chiefly raised by her French haute bourgeois mother
Sophie Semin, is about the same age and Handke could have asked her to get an
idea of a typical French girl her age – Alexia is not Laocadie Semin/Handke not
by the farthest stretch of the imagination, who I am sure has other songs in
mind aside Eminem and is unlikely to be part saint in the making. If Alexia is
meant to be rendered as a typical upper-class girl that decided to go
her own way around the world he could have consulted with this daughter – the
few dabs in the direction of establishing a background are not only unnecessary
but distractingly insufficient.
Young adults that age have
sex, entirely friendly sex it may be, non-committal pleasurable hook-ups or
romantic involvements, and it is as much part of their life as breathing but in
that respect Alexia and Valter do not exist as separate characters but as a
vehicle for Handke to memorialize a region and as a memory of once projections
of chasteness – the passage on p. 414-5 telling of Alexia’s dream of a possible
brides-groom strike me as appropriate to a saint in the making - Like Handke Alexia 9s also into the blues but her association to a lot of
the same far-ranging places that Peter Handke has been are rather minimal and
don’t add much - the mere mention of the
Bering Sea or Yesenin River etc. etc. fail to add more than a very few specific
experiences and thus fail to tantalize in the same manner in which her current
expedition does. Her two nights of the expedition are spent, in both instances,
in different inns, and I wonder whether Handke ever sleeps during his many
country walks under the Hawthorn tree on an August moon, whether at the Bering
sea he slept in an igloo – I note his many interestingly described hotel stays,
including one in the Kosovo in that piece of reportage Velica Hoca
but
wonder how hardy a vagabond he is… while conceding that the likes of Handke and
the Norman Mailer of Why Are We in Vietnam, can absorb, say, more
wildflowers in the Brooks Range, in a day that would take the in some respects
slow me a week to incorporate.
I am
caviling a bit here, very minor caviling, but where I praise as highly as I do
I feel that I must also wonder a bit why Alexia must have a family and a family
get-together at the end – why we must suddenly be novelistic in an
old-fashioned sense where Handke once upon a time said he would never be.
Alexia vagabond can wander anywhere she likes and does not need the obvious
motivation of a not overly exciting family get-together as an excuse. “That is
how the tale wants it, the way the tale tells it,” is an author‘s frequent imprecation who admits at the end
that the dweller of the NO-MAN’S-BAY is
writing the book. He could easily have come out and said, “It’s me Peter
Handke, I am writing a Peter Handke Book, and using Alexia will be a lot more
fun and allows my imagination and playfulness to roam as I can’t doing a
notebook or a travel account.” And no one would mind – certainly not this late
in the game.
However,
as we read her marvelous adventures up the river Viosne and in the Vexin there
is no mention of looking for Mom – has it slipped the author’s mind? The only
thing being looked for is that lost cat by it owner – the sound of his looking
pervades Alexia’s hike. The night that Alexia stays in the tiny chambre of the
Auberge de Dieppe the smell from one of Mom’s shawls wafts about, but the
formidable Bankieress has only stuck her head into the tiny room and found it
wanting is the sole reminder of the alleged objective of the expedition – the
Bankieress is about, a most improbable event that she would be scrambling
around the Vexin, that she has gone gaga, but never mind? Now if that moribund cat
would transform itself into the mad bankieress that would be the kind of miracles
Handke does not write.
At
the end of the book there is a family get together – that appears to have been
Alexia’s destination but was not mentioned when she set forth; and her teenage
brother is working as a carpenter apprentice – no advance mention that he would
be in Chaumont - and I think some of these matters, judging by minor loose ends
and contradictions and improbabilities were made up as Handke went along?
ALEXIA
as THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN’S younger sister is as odd as her creator who has worked
life-long at appearing normal.
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