SOURCE: “A Superior Reality,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1991, p. 20.

In the following review, Hofmann offers a positive assessment of Absence.

Peter Handke's descriptions of reality are of two kinds: some are of superior accuracy, some describe a superior reality. After an initial struggle, Absence settles down as a book of the second type. In German, it was subtitled Ein Märchen. The English publisher’s blurb works out an ambitious platform for it as “a narrative scrutiny of the absence which lies at the heart of human identity and endeavour”, but to me it seems a book entirely without and against reason: it could have been any length, about any subject, under any title. Purely aleatory, it allows the author and reader the greatest possible freedom.

Handke brings together four protagonists—the epic trope from Homer to Westerns—and then takes them for a walk, a loop...