Fight to the finish

The town of Chaville, outside Paris, has a sleepy, almost pastoral, air. It's here that Peter Handke, the fallen man of German letters, lives secluded behind high fences and trees. Once Austria's most venerated living writer, Handke fell from favour with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia for his pro-Serb polemics.

In his home beside the forest, Handke lives without a computer, beyond the reach of the consumerist and media culture that his neo-Romantic novels, calling for communion with nature, seek to remedy. The gate opens and Handke greets me bare-footed. He's been walking in the forest gathering wild mushrooms and berries, piled high on the outside table where we sit. 'Don't be hard on me,' says Handke, 65, nursing an arthritic hand. 'I'm not feeling well.' Serving mushroom soup for lunch, he tells me not to fear: he can, he promises, identify the poisonous varieties.

No contemporary European writer has experienced such extremes of praise and ignominy as Handke. He achieved fame in his early 20s as an enfant terrible associated with the so-called Gruppe 67, which sought to free literature from the politically engaged realism of post-war German literature. In a historic symposium at Princeton University in 1966, he condemned Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll for reducing fiction to social criticism. Handke argued that language was the only reality that art was capable of representing.

His early plays were succs de scandales that attacked the artifice of the theatre. Doing away with theatrical conventions of character and plot, his debut anti-play, Offending the Audience (1966), consisted of anonymous actors assailing the paying public.

But his international reputation rests predominantly on his fiction, most notably A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), a strangely powerful novella about his mother's suicide at 51; and Repetition (1986), which follows a writer from Handke's native province of Carinthia, who journeys to Slovenia in pursuit of a brother who vanished in the second world war.

When fellow Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in 2004, she said Handke deserved it more. Most people agreed, but Handke's support for Slobodan Milosevich's regime was surely anathema to the controversy-shy Swedish Academy. International opinion rounded on Handke in 1996 when he published A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia. Fusing travelogue with political tract, Handke portrayed the Serbs as 'an entire, great people that knows itself to be scorned apparently throughout Europe, and experiences that as insanely unjust'. Handke found in Serbia a pre-capitalist idyll of people drinking water from their hands. Belittling the Serbs impoverished by western economic sanctions, Handke hoped the country would remain untarnished by consumerism.

On encountering a man who 'literally screamed at how guilty the Serb leaders were for the present suffering of the people', Handke writes: 'I did not want to hear his damnation of his leaders; not here, in this space, nor in the city or the country.' His distrust of journalism made him elevate his intimate encounters with ordinary Serbs concerning the reported facts of Serb brutality. He argued that Bosnia's Muslims massacred their own people in Sarajevo and then held the Serb forces responsible. Using scare quotations to invoke the Srebrenica 'massacre', he questioned 'the naked, lascivious, market-driven facts and supposed facts'. Justice for Serbia makes it seem as if foreign journalists were the main culprits of the Yugoslav wars. 'The journalists committed real crimes with language,' Handke says. 'You can kill a lot of people with language.'

Handke continues his assault on the media in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, his latest work to appear in English. A 500-page philosophical novel, originally titled The Loss of the Image, it features a wealthy female banker who credits her success to the inspiration of fleeting 'images', which fill her with a sense of vigour. 'When I was young images came to me involuntarily,' says Handke. 'They meant everything to me. Then as life went on, the images became weaker and weaker.'

Predictably, Handke blames the decline of authentic images on the media. As the unnamed celebrity banker journeys to Spain's La Mancha region to meet her biographer, she is joined by a reporter whom Handke lampoons for his imperviousness to subjective experience. They encounter a secluded population known as the Hondarederos, whom the reporter dismisses as 'refugees from the world'. But for the banker, whose romantic outlook parallels Handke's sentimental vision of the Serbs, the primitive people lead Eden-like existences, with an intimate relationship to a land uncorrupted by western capitalism.

Handke describes his long, elliptical sentences as a battle against opinion. 'I have a lot of anger, but I have to avoid it when I write. But you can't avoid it because the fury is a material thing in you. So your sentences become very complicated. I have to be moved, but a moment before I get profoundly moved there's a kind of light that moves me in a direction other than emotion.'

He dismisses Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke as 'an ideologist who says, 'this is how people are'.' Handke is equally disdainful of leading European writers Alain Finkielkraut, Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy: 'They are not intellectuals, they're not searching. They know where good and bad is.'

Handke's speech, like his prose, is often fragmentary and elusive, but he bristles at attempts to pin him down: 'When you ask a question and start with 'why', it's a fake. You can't answer that. There are so many 'whys', so many non-reasons.'

Handke's heroine was inspired by his encounters with female bankers. 'They had to be cruel, but at the same time they were very sensitive. Each one looked hurt and in danger. I told myself, 'this is a controversial person'.'

I ask about the perplexing subplot involving the banker's brother, a terrorist, who dreams of an unspecified utopian country. Handke says the brother's story remains a fragment because it was too painful to complete - presumably because it echoes Handke's blighted romance with Greater Serbia. 'For a lot of us there's a country which suggests a brighter life - a life with more soul. That never could be Yugoslavia now,' he says.

Handke's romantic sensibility pervades his recollections of growing up near the Slovenian border. 'It was a very authentic and dignified life - the forest, the apples, strawberries, blackberries, mushrooms; looking, hiding, smelling.'

An ethnic Slovene, his mother was traumatised by the deaths of her two brothers in the second world war. 'They were Yugoslavians in their minds and souls, but they were obliged to fight in Russia for Hitler - something they wanted to fight against. My mother was in love with her dead brothers all her life. This was the myth of my family. What she told me about them was the beginning of me as a writer.'

Handke started to read seriously at 12, during six years at a Catholic boarding school from which he was finally expelled for reading a sexually explicit Graham Greene novel. He eventually studied law, while determined, he says, 'to save myself through writing'. Handke attributes his vague interest in the law to his hatred of his stepfather, Bruno Handke - a tram driver whom his mother married before he was born. 'Sometimes I told myself that I wanted to become a defence lawyer to defend murderers. I could imagine killing someone - my stepfather when he was drunk. He became very violent and would hit my mother. For us children, it was unbearable. I always fantasised about taking an axe and killing him during his sleep. In my imagination, I killed him every night.'

When he delivered a eulogy at Milosevic's funeral in 2006, Handke fulfilled his youthful fantasy of defending a murderer. 'His death symbolised the end of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia for me was the most beautiful, free and utopian republic in Europe.'

France's leading theatre company, the Comedie-Francaise, subsequently withdrew a scheduled performance of Handke's play Voyage to the Sonorous Land, or the Art of Asking. Soon after, when Handke was awarded the prestigious Heinrich Heine Prize, the politicians of Dusseldorf threatened to veto the jury's decision. Handke pre-emptively renounced the award in a letter to the mayor headed, 'Je refuse!'

'My last book received almost no reviews in France. They boycott my writing because of my erotic attraction to funerals,' he says with a laugh.

Dubbing my voice recorder 'the hostile machine', he takes delight in using the presence of a journalist to vent his contempt for the profession. 'Journalists, they hate literature. Journalists write and write, and travel and travel, and drink whisky and drink whisky, but they never become heroes like writers - only when they're killed. They now have even more power than the government, but they're not grateful. They are mean people. They hate writers.'

Evening has fallen by the time I leave, and Chaville has taken on a more desolate air. I remember what Handke said earlier: 'In Paris people think they're not alone, but they are. Here they know they are alone. There are a lot of drunks - a lot of lost people. I like that.'

Handke's wife, German actress Katja Flint, now lives in Paris to afford him the solitude to write. Perhaps no contemporary writer evokes the elation and despair of loneliness better than Handke. Like Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Knut Hamsun, whose literary masterworks remain admired despite their fascist politics, Handke deserves a permanent place in literary history. But his idiosyncratic aesthetics and his cynicism about the media can no longer be sidelined as merely the innocent excesses of an eccentric mind.

Writer's notes

Genre Literary fiction

Latest book Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

Age 65

Family Two daughters, aged 40 and 16. Married to German actress Katja Flint

Lives in Chaville, near Paris

Other works available in English The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Short Letter, Long Farewell, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Left-Handed Woman, The Weight of the World, Repetition, A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

Other jobs Playwright, pro-Serb activist, film director and screenwriter

Next project A novel about an ex-writer living on a boat in Serbia, recounting the story of a journey across Europe

What the critics say

'There is no denying Handke's wilful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion.'

- John Updike, The New Yorker

Author's bookshelf

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

'It is the rhythm of dream, of profound life. Not the stream of consciousness like James Joyce's - it is the stream of the universe.'

The Castle by Franz Kafka

'His sentences are so palpable. I never could understand why the protagonist wants to go up to the castle. When I saw a castle, I was always happy to stay down.'

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

'Philip Marlowe never sleeps, and it's during three days, three nights - like Christ in his tomb - that Marlowe is solving a murder case.'

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'[His] people have such a lot of problems. You envy them when you're young. They are so excited and hysterical about nothing.'

The Stranger by Albert Camus

'The Stranger told a story without explication and I was fascinated by this.'