After Images

The artistry of Peter Handke’s language may well be unsurpassed among contemporary writers in German. His prose is at once serpentine and spare, dreamlike and exacting. In his latest novel translated into English, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the Austrian author richly demonstrates his literary gifts, and the translator, Krishna Winston, sensitively renders the mesmerizing beauty of his style. In this book, as in much of Handke’s previous work, the most stirring passages disclose the inherent strangeness of the world. Take, for example, his description of a dragonfly hovering before the eyes of the novel’s female protagonist, in which he captures the vicissitudes of perception: It looked as though only the spindly body were floating there, with the oversized head in front, blue-black, a yellow

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