Once Again for Thucydides

"Once Again for Thucydides" is a collection of twelve short journals Peter Handke wrote on trips around the world, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, from Salzburg to the sea of Hakkaido in Japan. In each journal, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their "simple, unadorned validity." What results is a word of remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of such random things as a tree, a shoeshine man, a boat loading on a pier, and discovers their inner workings and mystery. Always, his writing hints at the unknown. Describing the snow melting in a garden or falling during an inland train ride through Japan, the glowworms illuminating the plains in Friuli, the tidal waters flowing and receding off the Atlantic coast of Spain, these amazing little "epics" reveal a narrator obsessed with the wonders of detail and marveling, as are we, at the scope and variety of the natural world. In the words of German writer Gerhard Meier, "Once Again for Thucydides" ends up being "a courageous and defiantly independent book."

History is not all battles and great leaders, nor huge social forces and turbulent change. Instead, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke suggests in this set of prose-poem-like essays, it embodies small moments, tiny fragments of landscape and memory. Set mostly in post-World War II Western Europe and the Balkans, his vignettes center on history's forgotten people and places: a young girl in Yugoslavia "wearing a bright frayed bandage on her knee," an ash tree in Munich near a triumphal arch "with its peculiar inscription, 'Dedicated to victory--destroyed by war--admonishing peace.'" Perhaps the most effective essay is a small narrative of the different hats one encounters in a Balkan city: kepis, berets, helmets, ski caps, fezzes, and all the other gear that separates one tribe from another. --Gregory MacNamee