SOURCE: “Tender Is His Plight,” in The New Leader, October 2-16, 1989, pp. 18-9.

In the following review, Kamine offers a positive evaluation of The Afternoon of a Writer.

This short novel [The Afternoon of a Writer] was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author.” That story describes one uneventful day in its protagonist’s life, episodically tracking his movements through Baltimore and recording his memory-laden reflections. It opens with the author feeling “better than he had for many weeks” and ends—after he suffers a crisis of confidence—with his resolution to go on writing. The piece is alternately ironic and elegiac.

Handke reproduces the story’s structure. His “writer” (like Fitzgerald’s “author,” he is never named) is at home working when he feels “impelled to go out” into the December twilight. An acute but fragile person, he ambles through an anonymous European city...