SOURCE: A review of The Afternoon of a Writer, in The Nation, December 4, 1989, pp. 694-5.

In the following review, Leonard offers a positive assessment of The Afternoon of a Writer.

Peter Handke's early novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and his semifictionalized memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, were both fiery gems. Since then, the Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and translator seems to me to have been painting himself into a corner and then complaining that he couldn’t move. His books got thinner and more exasperating. So what if language itself were the secret hero of listless narratives like A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman and Repetition? We’d been here before—at this impasse, in this trap—in the superior company of Kafka and Rilke and Sartre. I found myself preferring Handke's collaborations with the filmmaker Wim...