Don Juan

A landmark novella by a Nobel Prize laureate, written in the 1970s. Incredibly deep, poetic, and unified by a single idea: a spiritually hollow existence is against our nature.

Handke shows how a mind closed in a loop of monotonous everyday actions prevents a person from finding themselves, becoming a real personality.

Don Juan, who in the author’s version turns out not to be a demonic seducer but an eternal wanderer, experiences an acute split with the hostile world around him and feels like grains of sand caught in the whirl of events. Can they emerge victorious from the struggle against threatening lifelessness and feel “the bliss of life without convulsions and fear”?