Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Don Juan: His Own Version: A Novel
    Don Juan: His Own Version: A Novel
    Don Juan: His Own Version: A Novel
    Ebook98 pages2 hours

    Don Juan: His Own Version: A Novel

    By Peter Handke

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke offers a wry and entertaining take on history's most famous seducer as he takes a respite from his stressful existence

    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. Don Juan: His Own Version 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, Peter 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 15, 2010
    ISBN9781429936347
    Don Juan: His Own Version: A Novel
    Author

    Peter Handke

    Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

    Read more from Peter Handke

    Related to Don Juan

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Re-Covered: In the Ditch

      Feb 28, 2019

      Re-Covered: In the Ditch
      10 min read

    • Article

      I Always Write in the Past: The Millions Interviews André Aciman

      Mar 25, 2021

      In writing truth, the act of writing already changes things, even if you swear the story is factually true. The post I Always Write in the Past: The Millions Interviews André Aciman appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar

      Dec 18, 2018

      The fact that this isn’t recognized for what it is, a magisterial work and a 20th-century masterpiece, makes me even more anxious about our times. The post A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Anthony Veasna So

      Dec 24, 2020

      I actually recommend everyone to stop taking books so seriously, so monogamously. The post A Year in Reading: Anthony Veasna So appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya

      Aug 20, 2019

      Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya
      10 min read

    • Article

      Derrida in Lahore

      Mar 19, 2024

      On the cold night of November 24, 1997, before Shahid disappeared forever, I thought I was his closest friend, his only confidant. We had known each other since we were children, attended primary and high school together, even gone to the same colleg

      26 min read

    • Article

      Russian Roulette

      Feb 1, 2021

      As a longterm fan of Dostoevsky (and yes, unusually for a 19th century literary novelist, he does have a kind of fan club, many of whom are adolescents high on the thrill of first encountering his freewheeling combo of philosophical pondering and jaz

      2 min read

    • Article

      I, Spy

      Aug 7, 2018

      Many things happened to me for the first time on a night in April 1944. I rode in a Black Maria; I jumped from a bomber with a tangled parachute; and I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent. We drove in the Black Maria from Int

      17 min read

    • Article

      Diary of Remorse

      Sep 6, 2022

      I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute bas

      20 min read

    • Article

      Opening the Field

      Sep 1, 2020

      Opening the Field
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reading Proust Aloud: ‘How Can It Be That Deeply Flawed And Terrible Humans Have The Capacity To Create?’

      Nov 12, 2022

      In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      An Ode to Being Read To

      Sep 16, 2022

      An Ode to Being Read To
      2 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Jun 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      11 min read

    • Article

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad

      Dec 9, 2019

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Don Juan

    3/5

    17 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Having a special interest in anything to do with Don Giovanni (per Mozart) and related works, I had to read this, but the ideas Handke has about this archetypal figure don't seem to be worked out as coherently and thus as convincingly as they might be. The Don Juan story seems to me to be more about those with whom he has liaisons, so the focus on the man himself is perhaps the problem for me here.

    Book preview

    Don Juan - Peter Handke

    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.

    At the time in question, I was cooking only for myself, for the time being, in my country inn near the ruins of Port-Royal-des-Champs, which in the seventeenth century was France’s most famous cloister, as well as its most infamous. There were a couple of guest rooms that I was using just then as part of my private quarters. I spent the entire winter and the early spring living in this fashion, preparing meals for myself and taking care of the house and grounds, but mainly reading, and now and then looking out one little old window or another in my inn, formerly a gatekeeper’s lodge belonging to Port-Royal-in-the-Fields.

    I had already lived for a long time without neighbors. And that was not my fault. I liked nothing better than having neighbors, and being a neighbor. But the concept of neighborliness had failed, or had it gone out of style? In my case, though, the failure could be attributed to the game of supply and demand. What I could supply, as an innkeeper and chef, was no longer demanded. I had failed as a businessman. Yet I still believe as much as ever in the ability of commerce to bring people together, believe in it as in little else; believe in the invigorating social game of selling and buying.

    In May I pretty much gave up gardening in favor of simply watching how the vegetables I had planted or sown either thrived or withered. I used the same approach with the fruit trees I had planted a decade earlier, when I took over the gatekeeper’s lodge and turned it into an inn. I made the rounds again and again, from morning to night, through the grounds, which were situated in the valley carved by a stream into the plateau of the Île-de-France. Holding a book in my hand, I checked on the apple, pear, and nut trees, but without otherwise lifting a finger. And during those weeks in early spring I continued steaming and stewing for myself, mostly out of habit. The neglected garden seemed to be recovering. Something new and fruitful was in the making.

    Even my reading meant less and less to me. On the morning of that day when Don Juan turned up, on the run, I decided to give books a rest. Although I was in the middle of reading two seminal works, seminal not only for French literature and not only for the seventeenth century—Jean Racine’s defense of the nuns of Port-Royal and Blaise Pascal’s attack on the nuns’ Jesuit detractors—I concluded from one minute to the next that I had read enough, at least for now. Read enough? My thought that morning was even more radical: Enough of reading! Yet I had been a reader all my life. A chef and a reader. What a chef. What a reader. I also realized why the crows had been cawing so ferociously of late: they were enraged at the state of the world. Or at mine?

    Don Juan’s coming on that May afternoon took the place of reading for me. It was more than a mere substitute. The very fact that it was Don Juan, instead of all those devilishly clever Jesuit padres from the seventeenth century, and also instead of a Lucien Leuwen and Raskolnikov, let us say, or a Mynheer Peeperkorn, a Señor Buendía, an Inspector Maigret, came as a breath of fresh air. At the same time, 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. It could just as well have been Gawain, Lancelot, or Feirefiz, Parzival’s piebald half brother—no, not him, after all! Or perhaps even Prince Myshkin. But it was Don Juan who came. And he was actually not altogether unlike those medieval heroes or vagabonds.

    Did he come? Did he appear? It would be more accurate to say that he hurtled or somersaulted into my garden, over the wall, which was an extension of the inn’s façade along the street. It was a truly beautiful day. After the kind of overcast morning so common in the Île-de-France, the sky had cleared, and now seemed to continue clearing, and clearing, and clearing. Yes, the afternoon stillness was deceiving, as always. But for the moment it predominated, and cast its spell. Long before Don Juan hove into sight, his panting could be heard. As a child in the country I had once witnessed a farm boy, or whatever he was, running from the constables. He raced past me on a path leading uphill, and at first nothing could be heard of his pursuers but their shouts of Halt! To this day I can see that boy’s face, flushed and puffy, and his body, which looks shrunken, his pumping arms seeming all the longer. But what has stayed with me even more vividly is the sound he was making. It was both more than panting and less. It was also more than whistling and less that burst out of both of his lungs. Besides, it was really not a question of lungs. The sound I have in my ear breaks or explodes out of the entire person, and not from his insides but from his surface, his exterior, from every single patch of skin or pore. And it does not come from the boy alone but from several, a large number, a multitude, and that includes not just his pursuers, bellowing as they gain on him, but also nature’s silent objects all around. This whirring and vibrating, no matter how unmistakably the hunted boy had reached the end of his strength, has stayed with me, representing an overwhelming power, an elemental force of sorts.

    I had hardly heard Don Juan’s breathing, far off on the horizon and at the same time very close, when I promptly had the runaway before me. The long-ago bellowing of the constables was replaced by the roar of a motorcycle. As the rider gave gas, the engine’s howl rose rhythmically, and it seemed to be coming ever closer to the garden, bucking over everything in its path, unlike the breathing, which had immediately filled the garden and continued to fill it.

    The ancient wall had crumbled a bit in one place, creating a sort of breach, which I had left that way on purpose. That was where Don Juan came hurtling head over heels onto my property. He had been preceded by a sort of spear, or lance, that whizzed through the air in an arc and dug itself into the earth right at my feet. The cat, which was lying next to that spot in the grass, blinked a few times, then went right back to sleep, and a sparrow—what other bird could have pulled this off?—landed on the still quivering shaft, which then continued to quiver. In actuality the lance was just a hazel branch, slightly pointed at the tip, such as you could cut for yourself anywhere in the forests around

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1