SOURCE: “On a Blue Note,” in Washington Post Book World, September 20, 1998, p. 8.

In the following review, McGonigle offers positive assessments of My Year in the No-Man's Bay and Once Again for Thucydides.

Peter Handke's literary career has a pleasingly ambitious feel to it, and over the years most of this Austrian writer’s many books and plays have been well translated and published in America.

Early Handke books such as the startling road novel Short Letter, Long Farewell, about a journey from Providence, R.I., to John Ford’s house in California, and A Sorrow Beyond Words, a meditation on the suicide of his mother, are impossible to forget. He captures the definitely modern feeling that something is wrong—a something freighted with words like “anxiety,” “tedium,” “despair.”

A new note of an acceptance of complex reality has gradually come to the fore in Handke's work (he is...