Peter Handke Critical Essay | Critical Review by William H. Gass

Critical Review by William H. Gass

SOURCE: “Drizzle, Birdcall, Leaf Fall,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 29, 1998, pp. 6-7.

In the following review, Gass offers a positive evaluation of My Year in the No-Man's Bay.

When the Seine leaves Paris for the Channel, it makes several large loops while being forced by physics to skirt high ground. The first of these “bays” contains the hills of the Seine, low waves across a crescent-shaped region upon which the suburbs have intruded, but where large forests still remain, and also an area that shelters an airfield frequently bombed during World War II, so that craters can be seen on its many wooded walks. La Hauts-de-Seine halfmoons a landscape that is historically layered, in touch with the city but almost country in character, neither entirely one thing nor the other, a condition that makes it attractive to this geographical novel, in which flora and fauna, climate...
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