Don Juan: His Own Version [Hardcover]

Peter Handke (Author), Krishna Winston (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374142319 | ISBN-13: 978-0374142315 | Publication Date: February 2, 2010 | Edition: First Edition

A MODERN MASTER’S WRY AND ENTERTAINING TAKE ON HISTORY’S BEST-KNOWN LOVER

In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his take on the famous seducer. Don Juan’s story—“his own version”—is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke’s Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space.

In this brief and wry volume, Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Don Juan catapults over a garden wall and into the life of an anonymous narrator in this short, frustrating novel. Over the course of a week, the narrator, a lonely French innkeeper, listens to Don Juan relate the adventures that culminate with his arrival at the inn. In the preceding seven days, Don has traveled from Tbilisi to Damascus, Norway, Holland and then to the last country, completely nameless before making his way to the French inn. The reason for his travels is never made clear, nor is his motivation for relating his story to the innkeeper. This sense of mysterious imbalance is compounded by the narrator's recounting of Don Juan's tales, which often deal with seductions and couplings either offstage or with clinical swiftness. The pointedly dry story about a character famous as a connoisseur of pleasures holds interest as a concept, but the novel's entertainment value is quickly buried under a pile of unanswered questions, and the endless deferring of literal and figurative climaxes feels almost like punishment. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Over the garden wall of an inn southwest of Paris, whose chef-proprietor is failing as a restaurateur, the legendary seducer leaps one May afternoon, fleeing a black-leather-clad couple on a motorcycle. Given a meal, he remains seven days, on each evening of which he relates his experiences of the corresponding day of the week preceding. He has been through a “womantime,” encompassing amorous encounters in Tbilisi, Damascus, Ceuta, Holland, Norway, and a “completely nameless” country—a prodigious itinerary, especially given the horse-drawn carriage in which he has traveled, driven by a servant he has recruited as effortlessly as he has managed to have the proprietor cook for him. He never has any trouble finding servants, it seems, nor amours. Everyone obliges him without his lifting a finger, and yet he feels—and is—always pursued. Handke’s perfectly suave novella is a rich tapestry of contradictions about desire and class that, besides its other pleasures, tweaks us with the facts that the chef, not Juan, narrates it and that it provocatively begs the question, Version of what? --Ray Olson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374142319
• ISBN-13: 978-0374142315
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #791,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brevity, wit, November 16, 2010

By 

Thomas F. Dillingham (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Don Juan: His Own Version (Hardcover)

Peter Handke's characteristic brevity and subtle intellect combine in this work. Not really a novel, at barely 100 pages it might be called a novella, but it is really a prose poem, as the best of Handke's work has been. Just as the work is difficult to characterize generically, it is impossible to describe without distortion. So much of it both is and is not what it is, as the narrator (who is not a chef and restauranteur, who lives in what is not any longer the convent at Port-Royal, and so on) frequently reminds the reader. Don Juan is and is not the central character (actually, the narrative is about time, as well as about not-time), and much of what happens will not have happened as the narrative progresses. In any case, Don Juan is not himself in this narrative, though it is presented as "His Own Version." What the book certainly is is a delightful and disturbing couple of hours of reading which, at least for me, led to a nearly immediate re-reading, which was similarly delightful and disturbing. Watch a couple of performances of Don Giovanni (plenty available on DVD--Keenlyside is particularly good, or Terfel) and then read this. You won't be sorry.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There have been a number of national reviews of Don Juan, March 14, 2010

By 

Michael Roloff "Michael Roloff" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Don Juan: His Own Version (Hardcover)

a middling one by Joel Agee in the New York Times Sunday book review in early March of 2010, the best so far is Dan Vitale's at THREE PERCENT


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Dan Vitale's review of Handke's DON JUAN is a good deal more perceptive than most that have appeared in this country. Nonetheless, he misses a few essential features. Don Juan is but a state of mind, a wish fulfillment into which the restaurateur, who is but a figure out of NO-MAN'S BAY, falls at a moment that he is especially bereft, a moment, it is a dream, a fantasy, and it is so magical in jumping from place to place as a dream or a cut film can be. WOMANTIME is the significant term here that is missed, this is no archetype; Vitale also avoids mention of Don Juan''s sidekick, the chauffeur, who only loves ugly women and whose sex life would seem to be a good deal grosser; also that the book celebrates as the great pop song had it ""what's love got to do with it"".. - bodies enjoying each other's sexuality. It is as earthy as the mushrooms the restaurateur fancies. Formally, the book combines the novelistic, film, dream and the essayistic; the figure that organizes it spatially and narratively are the whirling dervishes. The faster they whirl the calmer the center as the book narrows down and then, once WOMANTIME is over and the TELLING is over, it unravels as does Don Juan back into ordinary counting time. In that sense the book is about aging. The book is about the eros of writing and loving that more than anything else, and is its own demonstration. It is one of Handke's finest and subtlest works, it asks to be read sentence by sentence, at about the pace at which it was written, 1000 words a day, and touches the very dark heart of the world: or rather, as it says: ""brushes is" - and wishes that by merely brushing it represents more accurately. And isn''t it odd that although a certain merriment prevails, is basic mode is rater B-minor, melancholy. The only thing that is complete is the description of the Port Royal abbey region, madre natura on which the restaurateur walks...

I have two pages devoted to DON JUAN AT:

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MICHAEL ROLOFF
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Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
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