Andreas Loser teaches classical languages and is obsessed with thresholds. He is a contemplative intellectual, reclusive, emotionally distant from his family (from whom he is separated), hesitant to commit himself to relationships, and in the habit of examining his every move before he makes it. He quotes Virgil. And yet, on an otherwise unremarkable evening while walking to his regularly scheduled card game, he notices a swastika spray painted on the trunk of a tree, finds the offender in the act of defacement, kills him, and dumps the body off the side of a cliff. After this his engagement with life and the act of living is greatly enhanced. A less controlled aspect of his personality emerges. He becomes by turns impulsive, moody, unreliable and deceptive, and the reader begins to wonder if perhaps the act of murder has somehow completed him as a human being. Loser's narrative is crammed with descriptive detail. With long lavish sentences and close attention to geography and to the natural world, Handke eloquently evokes life in small town Austria and in the rural borderlands near the German frontier. A self-conscious story narrated by a sophisticated man who seems well acquainted with himself, and yet who has no idea what he is capable of.
