Infinite Books

From my old car trips across America, I remember that when I was driving, for example, across Utah or Montana, there was a period, shortly before sunset, when the landscape was becoming indescribably beautiful. In the golden light, the mountains and the road were bathed in the softness. I felt the uniqueness of that moment: so elusive yet permanent.

I experienced a similar feeling of “golden hour” reading “The Fruit Thief” by Peter Handke. A young woman sets off from a town near Paris towards the north to meet her parents and brother. She is initially followed by a narrator. He gets ejected from his stationary lifestyle as a writer after being bitten on a foot by a bee and watches her first walking along a dirt road and casually picking a fruit from a tree, then boarding a train to Paris. But at one point, the fruit thief, whose name is Alexia, somehow manages to leave the narrator’s watchful eye and continues her journey alone, or rather, we, the readers, are following her now. She is well prepared for the trip and has everything in her bag that can be of use to her. Alexia walks alone but meets others. One day, her companion is a delivery boy who leaves his scooter and walks with her, silently but as if bound by a secret agreement. There are other people and places she comes across on her journey – an old innkeeper, a woman friend from the past, and someone looking for a lost cat. As the cards in the deck, these people take the top spot for the moment, but they disappear, allowing the fruit thief to be on her way.

This is a beautiful novel, one of the best I have ever read: a poetic, imaginary book that can be compared to a painting, and I just wanted to continue reading it, day after day. And the language: the way Peter Handke constructs pictures and sentences made me walk with the fruit thief, and not merely walk with her but feel submerged in her world, full of scents and colors.

The words ending the novel summarize it best: “Just think of what she had experienced in the three days of her journey into the interior of the country, and how every hour had been dramatic, even if nothing happened, and how every moment something had been at stake, and after barely three days one bright summery strand in her dark hair: strange. Or not strange after all? No, strange. Still strange. Extremely strange.”