La lladre de fruita

Alexia or Aleksija, even sometimes Alice, whom everyone calls "the fruit thief", is about to embark on a "solo expedition" through French Picardy in search of her great. Before leaving, his father, with whom he has breakfast in a Parisian restaurant, gives him some advice for the trip. However, the story does not begin with Alexia, but with the figure of the narrator, who, to testify to the experiences, discoveries and adventures of this traveling woman, leaves one day in August from the bay. of no one, a fictional space from an earlier narrative by Peter Handke. We are dealing with a Peter Handke in its purest form, before his "last epic," as he has defined it himself. The protagonist is again a woman, but this time she is not a "left-wing woman", nor a visionary, like the one For the peoples, but the daughter of the banker of The loss of the image, to whom we meet again fifteen years after his journey through the Sierra de Gredos. The Fruit Thief recounts three days of Alexia's life, three days of journey that are also three days of initiatory journey, of inner discovery, of great journey to the origins: an essential and constant ambition in the work and in the Handke's life. During her introspective journey, Alexia experiences the beauty of the landscape, knows friendship, loneliness ..., without forgetting the allusions to conflicts and the dehumanization of contemporary society. All through contained scenes, brief encounters, in the line of August Strindberg's Way of Damascus, but also playful and pathetic monologues and illuminating, sometimes surprising, observations that show enormous sensitivity. of this author when discovering, with an authentic and inimitable style, the seed of the transcendent in what is seemingly banal.