Summary
Peter Handke: Don Juan
An unusual story about Don Juan who, overcome by the need to confess, finds his ideal listener and reveals to him an exciting and incredible story about how he spent seven days with seven beautiful women. Peter Handke brings to life a much different character of Don Juan than is usually thought, written or spoken.
"I can testify: Don Juan is someone else. I saw him as someone who was loyal - personal loyalty. To me, he was more than just kind - he was attentive. And if I met a fatherly man, then it was him: You listen to him and trust him. At the same time, all those seven days he remained distant from me in a nice way, and that was for me, who for a long time dreamed only of others and of other people's stories, in which I did not appear, it suited and was right..."
These sentences are from the very end of the novel "Don Juan", a work that represents a review and a new (re)creation of the myth of Don Juan. And this time, Peter Handke places the novel in the modern Middle Ages, and Don Juan appears as a man who, overwhelmed by the need to confess, finds an ideal, neutral listener - the narrator of this work. Listening, together with the narrator, to stories about seven days spent with seven women of exceptional beauty, the reader witnesses the desacralization of the myth of Don Juan, but also confronts his other faces. The writer even claims that don Juan was not a seducer, nor was he seduced.
"He had power. Only his power was something else". In just a hundred pages, this novel brings excitement and knowledge that many books larger in scope and ambition of the author do not bring us. Before us is an unpretentious work by a master writer that can really be read in as many ways as there are readers. After all, the reader is a person who wants to be seduced - by the story. And story is also a form of power. - Sanja Domazet
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