The Great Fall

On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind. The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the countrys president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a filmperhaps his lastin which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the societyhomeless people and migrantsbut he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism. Things dont improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he cant help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the Great Fall? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.