&;On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.&;
The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country&;s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film&;perhaps his last&;in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society&;homeless people and migrants&;but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism.
Things don&;t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can&;t help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the &;Great Fall&;? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.
