The Great Fall

-On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.- The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country-s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film-perhaps his last-in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society-homeless people and migrants-but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism. -Things don-t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can-t help but see the alienation characteristic of its resident