The Second Sword: A Tale from the Merry Month of May, and My Day in the Other Land: A Tale of Demons

The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are two new novellas by the 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke. The first picks up the story where Handke’s last work of fiction, The Fruit Thief (described in The New York Times as “an experience of unadulterated literature”), left off. Here a man has returned to his home in the suburbs of Paris, only to soon set out again. Why? We learn, over the course of a story redolent of Handke’s harrowing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that he is seeking to avenge his mother, who has been unjustly denounced in the pages of a newspaper. The Second Sword is a suspenseful work of self-examination: Will the narrator’s journey end in him throwing down the gauntlet? My Day in the Other Land is Handke’s most recently published work - and the first to be written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Evoking imagery from the Bible and classical mythology, it portrays a man who has been possessed by demons, causing him to rage endlessly against the inhabitants of his rural village. Aided by his sister, he embarks on a journey to a lake on whose opposite shore lies the “other land.” What ensues is an exorcism of sorts - and one of Handke’s most evocative and original endings.