DON Juan

KPGT

DON JUAN by Peter Handke

120 minutes

Towards the end of October, in a restaurant amidst the ruins of the Port-Royal des Champs monastery, just outside Paris, approximately where our friend Handke really picks mushrooms and forest berries behind his house, Don Juan arrives, fleeing from a pair of angry motorcyclists. He recounts the story to two chefs of his last seven days: from a wedding in Tbilisi last Monday, to the beauty who looked at him strangely in Damascus the next day, and the flock of flamenco dancers in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco on Wednesday, then about the witch Anitri from the fjord in Bergen on Thursday, and the Moldavian girl in a shop window next to the canal in Amsterdam on Friday, ending with a member of the Folk Dance Ensemble Ivo Lola Ribar from Guča on Saturday - Don Juan "himself": soup from the Chevreuse valley, French white wine, and buckwheat bread with walnuts, nuns and Jean Racine, Jansenists vs. Jesuits and Blaise Pascal, Phaedra and incest, all in all: Peter Handke or Molière's Don Juan and Tirso de Molina, unfairly maligned for wrongdoings towards women, morality, and "political correctness"... but: this novel is not written in defense of Don Juan - it is written as self-defense 'between dream and reality' of the persecuted, former, and future asylum seekers.