By Reviewed by Paul West

Sunday, January 21, 2001; Page BW06

ON A DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE
By Peter Handke
Translated from the German By Krishna Winston
Farrar Straus Giroux. 186 pp. $23

A subtle writer of unostentatious delicacy, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke excels at fiction that, as it grows, coils around itself like wisteria. What is especially interesting about On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a title that recalls both Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler and those of Bach cantatas, is the protagonist, a pharmacist marooned in a hamlet near Salzburg, telling his story to the narrator, which makes for more vibration and resonance than usual: The captive audience has a prisoner, and we have both.

The lonely pharmacist's tale gradually accumulates density without ever seeming fuzzy, and there is a fragile crescendo toward a climactic instant when the pharmacist gets a bang on the head rendering him speechless -- at which point the novel changes completely into a fantastic extravaganza in the Alps. The novel's narrator, who has hitherto had access to the pharmacist's speech, now has a clear view into his mind.

This is not so much a shift as a metamorphosis; the novel goes from placid assembly and philatelic perusal of everyday things (blackbirds, mushrooms, bicycles, apples, a bakery) into hyperbole, rendered in the same even tone. It is not as if Handke hasn't warned us, managing several times to embed in his narrator's text the sort (and sport) of mutable vision Polonius has in "Hamlet." Excerpts from another world get into the book to make us nervous or expectant -- for example, the well-known pioneers of flight Graf von Ferdinand Zeppelin and Otto Lilienthal come up in conjunction with lesser-known ones such as "Nungesser and Coli. . . who attempted the first transatlantic flight and vanished." That's a mild sample. Here is a more ambitious one: In a thicket, tied bags with "only a wet cowlick poking out here and there" become a company of soldiers resting. In a similar manner, extraneous material flops into the novel to amplify and multiply it, and we encounter ancient Egyptians ("only the men were brown; the women had to be white as alabaster or cheese"), and the pharmacist turns alchemist when he tampers with known nostrums, "transforming them into another substance."

It all makes sense when you read, on page 49, "No. You, the recording scribe, mustn't be the master of my story. After all, not even I myself am master of my story." One's head among phenomena is never quite a master of itself and can easily be dispossessed by a shower of the unprecedented. Or by a determined narrator.

Handke's short, gently shaped novel thus becomes a fugue of visual gradations and shocking swaps. Our pharmacist, a Renaissance man in many ways, gets knocked out of himself, then knocked back, with speech returned, but sea-changed. It is not the state of devastation proposed by William James, or quite the ecstasy invented by the Greeks for when you're evicted from yourself, but it is mutability writ large -- perhaps (as Shelley writes in his ode to it) the only thing that endures.

So much for the novel's theme. Numerous pleasures await the reader who delves into the fabric of Handke's prose. Take the blackbird, for instance, "with a black, shiny, seemingly eyeless head, a knight in search of single combat, his visor already closed." Or this: "A cloud field, white, rippled, foamy, forming dunes. Flat oval stones here and there on top of the highland scree, with a black circle in the middle: pebbles polished by the Ice Age, which had sunk into the ocean here as the snow melted, called 'eye stones.' "

The novel, for all its concern with the commonplace, never scants the rapture of nature, to which, in almost quizzical vein, it opposes the fabrications of the mind. At the end, the pharmacist tells the narrator "I want to have my story in writing." He certainly got it. This is where the French New Novel might have gone if pushed. •

Paul West is the author of many books, including "O.K.," "The Dry Danube" and "The Secret Lives of Words."