Review by Booklist Review
When Handke won the Nobel Prize in 2019, the committee noted his interest in "the periphery and specificity of human experience." Considering this novel, that is an understatement. The tale covers no more than three days, beginning with the narrator's departure for an agricultural region in northern France where Handke has a home, following the eponymous "fruit thief" in her journey there by train and mostly by foot. This is almost a prehistory of experience, a demanding, engrossing narrative tracking tiny moment-to-moment changes of mood and impression, the sort of interior detail most writers would consider insignificant. Indeed, this intense focus on interior minutia creates a sense of tedium as Handke avoids providing so much of what we expect from novels. Then again, life has a way of giving us too little of the kind of excitement we crave. "What could happen? What could take place? It--whatever that might be. So: no rush on the in-between stretches." Handke offers a reading experience that requires, and repays, a certain surrender. A collection of his essays, Quiet Places, is being published simultaneously.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobel laureate Handke (The Moravian Night) delivers a glacially slow but erudite journey through the northern French countryside. It begins on an August day when the narrator, an unnamed older gentleman, sets out from Paris to follow a young woman he calls the "fruit thief" on her trip to Picardy. The fruit thief, whose name is Alexia (a reference to the patron saint of travelers) meanders, spirals, and walks backward through the outer suburbs of Paris on her way toward the Vectin plateau, at times in the company of a delivery boy, a dog, a raven, and a dying cat. But who she is, why she steals fruit, and the purpose of her pilgrimage remains unclear. The author is a savvy explorer of the minutiae of human experience, and makes every hour of his wanderer's sojourn "dramatic, even if nothing happened," as the narrator notes. Handke's descriptions of the landscape's sights and sounds, such as how the peal of church bells bends into the roar of a confluence of rivers, offer much to savor. It adds up to a powerful anthem for "the eternally daunted undaunted," as the narrator calls those "detour-takers" who might relate to the fruit thief, the "bitterness-lovers," and "lost cause defenders." Admirers of the stylistically cavalier Handke will be rewarded for taking in the scenery of this story. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Narrated by an elderly man who steps on a bee, this latest from Nobel laureate Handke (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams) takes readers on an intimate journey through the cities, towns, and rural expanses of north-central France. The incident compels the man to ruminate at great length on the insect's life cycle, and he soon sets off from his home near Versailles to the Picardian highlands of the Vexin region. Along the way, he details his encounters with neighbors, townsfolk, and other travelers. The novel then shifts to his relating the adventures of the lovely young Alexia, the eponymous fruit thief. Walking from Paris to Picardy during three hot days in August, Alexia acquires traveling companions, saves a lost cat, spends a night in an almost abandoned hotel, and steals fruit and vegetables. Every experience here becomes part of Handke's gorgeous, multilayered tapestry. VERDICT Handke's work was first published in 2017 in German, and this excellent English translation highlights the picaresque nature of the story. Alexia is an appealing vagabond as she moves from one episode to another, and Handke is a marvel at capturing and digging deeply into the history, sights, sounds, smells, and feel of France, which comes alive in his masterly hands.--Jacqueline Snider
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wandering, seemingly plotless novel by Austrian writer Handke. It begins with a bee sting: A pensioner in the exurbs of Paris walks barefoot in the grass and earns a hymenopteran bite for his troubles. Spurred, he takes the occasion to pack his bags and go for an adventure that it pleases him to think is somehow illegal. "Yes, at last I would lay eyes on my fruit thief, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, very soon, as a person, the whole person, not just the phantom fragments my aging eyes had glimpsed in all the years before, usually in the middle of a crowd, and always at a distance, and those glimpses had never failed to get me moving again," writes Handke in a typically winding sentence. That fruit thief is a young woman who soon becomes the center of the story even though the oldster remains the omniscient narrator. He dislikes the new Europe: "I usually found women in veils properly--or improperly--offputting," he grumbles, having encountered Muslim women on a train. He finds his fellow humans thick as bricks: "Nothing makes them prick up their ears." The young woman, Alexia, is no more tolerant, a Nietzschean rebel who emerges as a younger, female doppelgänger to the older man's world-weary curmudgeon. She wanders across France, her vast handbag full of, yes, pilfered fruit that she considers it her right to possess, staking out places where she can readily nab the stuff: "She evaluated each place according to the spots, nooks, and crannies where a piece of fruit grew that she could grab." Why not televisions or late-model Renaults? Alexia falls in with an occasional companion who, Handke takes pains to point out, is of darker complexion than she, "fighting his way at her side through this European jungle." Their travels don't amount to much, but they afford Handke plenty of opportunities to sneer at modern mores and modern life and the boring homogeneity of humankind, especially the non-European sort. A carping, tedious journey into the hinterlands. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
