If you've been tapping your foot impatiently for the next "great" postmodernist novel--hierarchies being bad, the quote marks are de rigueur--brace yourself: The wait is over! The book is Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the author is the Austrian writer Peter Handke, and midwife to the enterprise is Krishna Winston, who translated the novel, which appeared in German in 2002 as Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos.

Bildverlust, as Mark Twain noted in his famous essay "The Awful German Language," is one of those "compound words constructed by the [German] writer on the spot and not to be found in any dictionary." It means something like "image-loss." It's a concept central to Handke's concerns here, but a word guaranteed to leave the prospective book buyer nonplussed. Hence, one assumes, its elimination from the English title.

Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD may be familiar with Handke from his public engagements during and following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Throughout the 1990s, Handke added his voice to those on the hard left who maintained that Europe and America had contrived the "so-called humanitarian intervention" in the Balkans for the benefit of Western bankers.

"Everybody says Sept. 11 is a magic date," Handke has declared: