I am quite happy to learn that Peter Handke has been awarded the new Düsseldorf 's Heinrich Heine Prize. Not that I think prizes are really representative of someone's art or greatness: but this can so much piss off all the creepy attackers of Handke's work and it's very welcomed.
Yes I am quite happy for it, regardless the opinions of a once-great-novelist Salman Rushdie, who called years ago Handke 'moron of the year' for his opinions about the Yugoslavian war, starting the whole pillory against him, and regardless the so called 'philosopher' Bernard-Henri Levy, who recently stated that Handke's plays should be banned from all theaters of France; for the Comedie Francaise too, that cowardly and accordingly removed Handke's plays from the scenes, and for the many others who insulted or neglected him and his work without even reading it, because he (while accomplishing new great results with it, particularly with the splendid recent novel 'Der Bildverlust') asked for a country and its people, the Serbian people, room for listening and understanding.
I don't know if the Heinrich Heine Prize is meant to be a political one, since many European literary prizes unfortunately tend to be political (the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, it's shamefully, stupidly political). The point is that Heine himself suffered criticism and censorship during his life, in his quest for an outspoken truth, but he managed anyway to be first of all a poet. I think that this is the best award Handke could receive, if only to accent this, that he remained first of all a storyteller and a poet, and his politcal opinions have not reduced his talents.
Heine was a poet, a satirist, an endless traveler just like Handke proved to be. And just like Handke do, he always kept his eyes wide, to see, understand, and live to tell. (I must have said already that Handke is my favorite living writer so I'll leave it at that. End of the post.)
-- in picture: Peter Handke in Kragujevac, 1999
