Customer Reviews

Homecoming: A novel (Random House Large Print)

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3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Bernhard Schlink stunned the reading public with his brilliant novel 1999 THE READER and once again with HOMECOMING he proves he is one of our most important authors today. Written in German and translated by Michael Henry Heim, HOMECOMING addresses, as did THE READER, the prolonged impact of the WW II fall of Germany on the lives of those who survived it. Not only is this a gripping story of a deserted son's search for his mysterious father, it is also a treatise reflecting on the horrors of evil and challenges the responsibility of those who perpetrated it and those who 'allowed' or were victims of its perpetration. There is much profound philosophy in these pages, enough to make the reader stop, think, turn to other resources for references, and become transported by the mind of a truly gifted writer.

Peter DeBauer was raised by his distant mother who refused to inform him about his father, a mysterious man who apparently wrote novels edited and published by is own parents (Peter's paternal grandparents with whom he has an intense bond) yet 'disappeared' form his life to become involved in surviving the war by moving to Switzerland and eventually to America where he became established as a political science professor at Columbia University where, as John De Bauer, he became a highly regarded professor and mind manipulator. The story concerns Peter's quest for finding his father, a journey that places him in locations throughout Europe, seeking bits and fragments of information from anyone even slightly connected with the information he has about his father, finding solace and love from various women, and eventually results in his compulsive trip to New York to investigate the infamous John De Bauer, only to be caught up in a fascinating retreat in the frozen tundra of Upstate New York, learning the truth about his shadowy father. 'Sometimes I feel a longing for the Odysseus who learned the tricks and lies of the confidence man..., set out restless in the world, sought adventure and came out on top, won over my mother with his charm, and made up novels with great gusto and theories with playful levity. But I know it is not Johann Debauer or John De Baur I long for; it is the image I have made of my father and hung in my heart.'

The magic of reading Schlink's books is the discovery of a mixture of brilliant story development with indelibly rich characters and the sharing of philosophizing about death, murder, suicide, guilt, and history's influence on who we will become. 'At what degree of cold, hunger, pressure, or fear does the layer of civilization start to peel away?' Yes, other writers are dealing with the scars left on the German mind living in the aftermath of the atrocities of national guilt. But few do it so eloquently and with such brilliant skill as Bernhard Schlink. At novel's end, the reader is consumed with the desire to start the book all over again. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 08

In Bernhard Schlink's "Homecoming" Peter Debauer, a lonely German man raised in the aftermath of World War II, is obsessed with the past. His single mother is a remote and strict parent who has always been reluctant to talk about Peter's father. The one bright spot in Peter's lonely childhood were the leisurely summer holidays that he spent at his grandparents' rustic home in Switzerland. There, Peter greedily studied snapshots of his father as a boy and learned that his father "had collected stamps, sung in the church choir, drawn, painted, and been a voracious reader." After retirement, Peter's grandfather collaborated with his wife on a collection of short fiction. One installment dealt with a German soldier who escaped from a Russian POW camp and returned home only to discover that his wife, believing him dead, has married another man. When Peter wants to read the ending the following summer, he realizes that it is missing; for some reason, he is driven by an intense need to know what happened to the soldier. His quest leads him to a house that is an exact duplicate of the one described in the story. There he meets and falls in love with a lovely and intelligent woman named Barbara. In addition, his continued pursuit of the tale's conclusion leads him to delve deeper into the checkered history of the man whose name he bears.

Schlink explores the pain of a child who has never known his father and whose mother willfully withholds key information that might put his mind at rest. The author uses Homer's "The Odyssey" as a recurring motif. What kind of man would wander the world rather than hurry home to the woman and son who love him? Peter is a lost soul whose relationship with Barbara splinters, throwing him into depression and isolation. (To his credit, he spends quality time with Max, his ex-girlfriend's son.) Although Peter makes a decent enough living in publishing, he is neither professionally nor personally fulfilled. After holding down several jobs and traveling to various locales, he ends up in New York City, where he meets a man who may hold the key to the mysteries that have tormented him for much of his life.

Michael Henry Heim does a fine job of translating Schlink's words from the German. At times, "Homecoming" is extremely poignant and evocative; it is heart-rending when a young man has never known his father, especially when his mother keeps him at arm's length emotionally. It is small wonder that Peter has such a difficult time forming meaningful relationships. Although Schlink makes the reader empathize with Peter and we care about the results of his search, the novel is not a complete success. At times, the author gets too bogged down in the nuances of the protagonist's endless angst. The last portion of the book, which should be dramatic, fizzles out disappointingly. Schlink goes off in too many directions, dealing with the vagaries of law, the nature of good and evil, the accountability of people for their past sins, and how men and women behave in extreme circumstances. Although Peter eventually gets the answers that he has sought for so many years, it turns out that they make very little practical difference. He realizes that each of us is responsible for his or her own choices. There is a limit to how long even the most self-indulgent individual can blame his failures on the shortcomings of his parents.

This is from the man who gave us the 'Reader'.
Schlink is one of the most interesting contemporary German novelists. He is a law professor in 'civil life', and that may account for the fact that he writes fewer books than some others. But this book is not really his first novel since the Reader, maybe only the first that comes out in English. (He has written a few excellent crime novels with an elderly former Nazi as a reformed private investigator, a man called Gerhard Selbs. The name allows Schlink all kind of puns in his book titles, as you can easily see if you understand a bit of German. Recommendable stuff.)
The Homecoming: a man, born around the end of WW2, tries to understand his father's life and disappearance. He has never seen him and knows only the vague stories that his mother reluctantly gave him. There is a mystery about the father.
At the same time he recalls that he read a manuscript of a war narrative as a child in Switzerland. A German soldier's 'adventures' in Russia, told in first person. The text was incomplete and the ending had been lost.
The novel moves back and forth between childhood and adulthood of the protagonist. We follow him in his present day life's complications and in his recollections, until he finds his father under somewhat dubious circumstances.
These circumstances are what made me deduct a star. The story finale borders on the kind of conspiracy theory and improbability that I do not consider an enrichment to the book. (On the other hand, if real life were not full of improbabilities, it were more predictable...)
Still well worth reading. In most of his books, Schlink explores the tension between past and presence in Germany, and between different attitudes towards understanding what happened and living with it. I am not always comfortable with his implications, the unspelled-out meanings. Maybe that is one of his strengths: he does not avoid ambiguity.

or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."
Charles Dickens, "Martin Chuzzlewit"

Bernhard Schlink's "Homecoming" takes us to a place where the sense of home is as strong as the strongest conjuration. His protagonist, Peter Debauer, has an acute, but unstated, sense of what a home should be but this acuity seems driven by the fact that all the hallmarks of a home are missing in his life. Peter was born during the war and raised in Germany during the post-war (WWII) years. His mother is emotionally distant and self-involved. His father is presumed to have been killed during WWII. As a child we usually grow up (or at least I did) hearing stories about our parents and extended family groups. Those stories, from the good, to the bad, and to the down right embarrassing, acted for me as an anchor that helped tie me emotionally to my extended family. I don't expect that my experience is unique. But this is post-war Germany and Schlink, as he did in The Reader (Oprah's Book Club)", takes us into a world in which Germany's post-war baby boomers are burdened with the silence of their mothers and fathers. Children do not ask "what did you do in the war, daddy?" and, if they do they don't get an answer. Schlink writes of a world in which the sins of the fathers, the guilt of the mothers, are still fresh and too raw to be discussed with the children. This lack of an anchor leaves Peter adrift and at sea in a very real sense. His life seems to be one in which he is carried along by the tides. He flits from relationship to relationship, and his career seems equally unstable. This is not to say that Peter doesn't have relationships or that he isn't smart enough or accomplished enough to make a decent living. But the sense that something is missing in Peter is very strong even as it remains unexpressed. "Homecoming" is the story of Peter Debauer's odyssey, his inchoate search for a homecoming.

I used the word odyssey because The Odyssey (Penguin Classics) is the centerpiece of the book's form and structure. Peter's most enjoyable moments come when he is sent by train to Switzerland to spend the summers with his paternal grandparents. During those summers he reads bits and pieces of manuscripts submitted to his grandfather for publication in a series of books published under the title "Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and entertainment". Peter becomes obsessed with the story of a German solider trying to make his way back from a Soviet POW camp. The narrative of that story tracks that of The Odyssey. But the manuscript itself is incomplete and Peter begins a search for the rest of the story and the story's author that takes him on his own odyssey. He travels throughout Germany, Switzerland and the United Sates.

However, the manuscript's last pages are missing and, driven by the desire for resolution, Peter spends much of his adult life in a quest for both the author's identity and the novel's conclusion. Peter's search is interwoven in the story with the threads of his own life. Kept at arm's length by his mother, Peter keeps pressing for more information about his father. As Peter acquires more information about his father we see yet another Odyssey begin to emerge.

I was drawn to Homecoming but also found it to be a bit flawed, particularly in the latter portions of the book. However, those flaws (an ending that seemed a bit too pat for example and a climactic scene in a hotel that was pretty blatantly telegraphed to us in an earlier chapter) were outweighed by Schlink's prose and by a theme, a search for meaning by a generation when much of the past, a family-past that places our lives in context is withheld from us. Peter Debauer may not be the fully-formed adult we might prefer in our protagonists but that seems to be the point. The point is the journey and the angst and guilt that made the journey necessary. Home is a strong word and Bernhard Schlink's Homecoming shows how much can be lost when that sense of home is lost on an individual or on a generation. This was a very thoughtful book and well worth reading. L. Fleisig

HOMECOMING is the story of a young man's search for his father and the true identity of a strange and charismatic man who threatens to keep the family secrets. His first novel since his international bestseller THE READER, author Bernhard Schlink brings the emotions between parents and children, lovers and friends, wartime and the ongoing and fallible complexities of peacetime to bear on some exceptional characters in this work of fiction about the world post-World War II.

A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grows up with his long-suffering mother and the painful absence of his father, supposedly a casualty of the war. As an adult, Peter begins to search for the inevitable truth about his own mother's background and the possibility of locating the father he has been missing all these years. There are doppelgangers, con men, lies and a long history of deceit to be overcome before he can rightfully claim that he knows his own family history. The search takes him halfway around the world and back. Putting together fragments of information, he is led to New York City, where his past and his future finally may come together.

Peter creates a new identity for himself and comes to America where he works to unravel a convoluted chain of secrets concerning John de Baur, a celebrated poly-sci professor from Columbia University and bestselling author. Known for his antagonistic philosophy of life and the remarkably charismatic rapport he has with those he teaches, de Baur is the key and the most difficult obstruction standing in the way of discovering what he needs to know. Add to that the fact that Peter may have just fallen in love with the woman he sees as a soulmate, and the rush to unraveling his true identity and that of his family becomes an even more important and profound journey.

Written in German and translated by Michael Henry Heim, HOMECOMING is a significant piece of fiction, resonating particularly in these times where right and wrong are sometimes greatly confused determinations. "Sometimes I feel a longing for the Odysseus who learned the tricks and lies of the confidence man..., set out restless in the world, sought adventure and came out on top, won over my mother with his charm, and made up novels with great gusto and theories with playful levity. But I know it is not Johann Debauer or John De Baur I long for; it is the image I have made of my father and hung in my heart." And it is in this proclamation that Peter encapsulates the power of the drama of HOMECOMING.

Usually a translation would not read as smoothly and elegantly as this one does. But clearly the translator did an excellent job since Schlink's prose comes through clear and strong. As much a mystery as a philosophical treatise on the importance of origins in the understanding of one's own place in the world, HOMECOMING offers a two-layer reading experience that will enthrall both the casual and serious-minded readers.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

but did not know what it should be like."

Most children growing up knowing little about an absent father will at some stage seek clues from the past in order to comprehend their own persona. The quest to fill gaps and to identify with their own behaviour may reveal unpleasant surprises. These can be especially disturbing for those growing up after a war during which their fathers may have condoned or even committed atrocities. In "Homecoming", Bernhard Schlink translates this complex theme into an engaging, multilayered tale, focusing on another sensitive topic of recent German history.

After "The Reader's"[1995] worldwide success, expectations for this follow-up novel have been predictably high. In the earlier book, the protagonist was presented as an accidental spectator and partaker in an older woman's exposure as a concentration camp guard. Here, Schlink couches the uncovering of an older generation's deceitful behaviour within a first-person's account of an active, at times obsessive, pursuit of a fictional character, its author, and indirectly of the protagonist's father. The author creates in Peter Debauer a modern-day Odysseus, who roams from place to place, unable to accept his life and "come home". Will he, eventually, find out what he was searching for - about the unknown figures and, especially, about himself?

Peter recalls his childhood memories fluctuating between those of his reserved and strict mother and of idyllic vacations at his grandparents' place in Switzerland. The mother avoided her son's questions about his father beyond the bare minimum: he had died during the war. His father's parents were not much better, and while sharing stories from their son's childhood, they omitted any reference to him beyond his student years. The lack of information had disturbed the boy, yet he had felt incapable of asking for more. On the other hand, he enjoyed his grandfather's tales of military campaigns and soldiers' homecoming stories. Schlink uses the grandfather's authority to raise contentious issues like honour and valour explained to the boy in the context of recent history. Accounts of German soldiers' tortuous travels in reaching home after escaping Russian POW camps were popular at the time and featured in the pulp fiction series that the grandparents published.

Despite prohibiting instructions, Peter secretly read parts of one such story on the galleys his grandparents had given him as scrap paper. Unfortunately, several chapters and the ending were missing. What had happened after the hero, Karl, reached home only to find his wife with young children and another man? Was it fiction or the author's personal experience? Coming across the fragment as an adult during a discontented period in his life, Peter's curiosity is reawakened to find the rest of the story and to trace its author. Coincidences facilitated his task as he put his mind to compiling the diverse pieces of evidence. Some clues challenged his up till then laissez-faire attitude to his emotional life, while others tested his political frame of reference. The more he found, the more he sensed some familiarity with the place to which Karl returned. Peter's new romantic interest, while adding new pieces to the puzzle, nonetheless also interfered with his pursuing the mystery.

In addition to applying Ulysses' Odyssey as a metaphor for Peter's quest, Schlink applies its structure to different levels of the narrative. As Peter's own life emulates the fictitious Odysseus, Peter's personal character adapts and changes as the situation or his obsession appear to require. Not surprisingly, given Schlink's own dedication to the profession and the specific topic he discusses, his protagonist joins the league of legal researchers. Schlink places Peter into historical contexts such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. In its aftermath archives were opened that brought much disturbing evidence to light. Mirroring the author's own experience, Berlin has a profound impact on Peter. It reveals another facet of his personality. Continuing his search there, he becomes aware of correlations between the composition of the fiction fragment and some academic legal texts, justifying fascistic ideology. This in turn leads him to new clues as to the author's identity. Drawing on several known contemporary cases of successful ideological turncoats, Schlink develops one such character into the primary counterpart to Peter. While he feels more repulsed by than attracted to this potential opponent, Peter devises a scheme to unmask him that takes him eventually to New York.

The author doesn't shy away from touching on some weighty topics that have been close to his jurist's heart for many years. He draws attention to some dubious legalistic philosophy and practice prevalent during the Third Reich and still persisting in some quarters, which, for example, argue for shifting guilt from the perpetrator to the victim, or from actor to commentator.

"Homecoming" is a complex and profound book and despite its fluid conversational style, should be read carefully with attention to the clues that, while appearing haphazard and scattered at first, combine into a meaningful whole. Peter Gebauer may not come across as a strong or likeable character, yet Schlink has succeeded in creating in him an excellent example of the type of person confronted with the challenges of his time. The topical political and philosophical controversies that are brought to light are well integrated into the narrative. They encourage pause for reflection without losing or sidelining the pre-eminent theme of the story. [Friederike Knabe]

Dazzled and moved by Schlink's novel 'The Reader' I avidly awaited his next novel. Unfortunately this reader of 'Homecoming' was disappointed. Schlink's work is high on intellectual and philosophical content i.e. the guilt felt by Germans born during or post WW 2. What is justice? Are there absolutes of right and wrong? In 'The Reader' Schlink took this content and enveloped it in a novel strong on plot and emotional punch. I will not repeat the story of 'Homecoming' (others here have done that already) beyond saying it involves a young German man's search for the father who disappeared before his birth and his father's involvement in the war. The search for the father does not fully gather steam until the reader is through a third of the book. By then I no longer really cared. The intellectual and philosophical content is there, but unlike in 'The Reader' the emotional has been strangled out of it. What plot there is is driven by more coincidences that an E.M Forster novel, which strains credulity. In the final analysis this novel left me empty and disappointed.

I am told that the questions raised in this book are important to Germans of the postwar generation, and I can believe it. We all find ourselves wanting to know more about our parents, using our imagination to fill in the things they don't tell us, perhaps wanting to find out whether the principles they taught us were really the ones on which they based their own lives. If a parent is dead or missing, those questions become more intriguing. And if this takes place against the background of a moral pandemic such as the Nazi era in Germany, the questions are more disturbing still, because ultimately they turn into an interrogation of oneself.

To his credit, Bernhard Schlink handles this much more subtly here than in his best-seller (and recent movie) THE READER. There, everything was focused on one particular person and one very specific atrocity. This book, however, is deliberately ambiguous about pointing the finger or even specifying the crime. As a result, it is less a person, or even a period, that is on trial, but a philosophy, with its possible legacy for the generations that follow.

There are several strands to the book, though I do not feel they are woven well together. On the surface is the life of the protagonist, Peter Debauer, a child of the forties, half German and half Swiss, growing up in both countries, becoming (like Schlink) a lawyer, moving into legal publishing, and getting involved with various women along the way. All of this reads very convincingly, and Peter's non-linear development is surely typical of his times. Indeed, Schlink makes much use of Homer's Odyssey as a model for the book, with the question of whether the story really is a homecoming narrative (ie. with a defined goal at the end), or whether the wanderings are not themselves the point. This literary thread becomes the second strand, in which Peter stumbles, more or less by accident, on a series of popular novels published by his grandparents, one of which he comes to think of as a roman-à-clef, a thinly-fictionalized version of real people and events. Personally, I think this device is too flimsy to be believable, although it does lead Peter to discoveries that affect both his love life and his sense of family. The third strand is a series of debates on judicial and political philosophy, that I find too abstract to work with the rest. It is as though Schlink could not decide what genre he was writing, and when he switches yet again to a melodramatic finale in the snowbound Adirondacks, he loses me completely. A pity, because I was getting to like his hero.

I found this novel by Bernhard Schlink, the author of "The Reader," to be both fascinating at points, slow at other points, and ultimately to have "punted" on the key element. Without spoiling the story, the central character, Peter, first appears as a child who travels each summer from his home in Germany to spend time with his paternal grandparents in Switzerland. He never knew his father who died in the war. The grandparents publish pulp fiction and provide him with ample scrap paper which contains pages from stories on one side. He is instructed to not read any of the story material. Ultimately, as an adult he does start to read some pages at random and becomes fascinated with the moral issues inherent in the fragments of one story. He becomes so fixated on tracking down the unknown author of this story that he devotes most of his activities as an adult to pursuing various leads. So, in part this is a detective story--the author is well known for several detective novels he has written, so this is his natural genre and he is quite good at it, for the suspense builds as the reader wonders if he will ever successfully put all the pieces together. It also develops a nice love story dimension, as well as raising the emotional issue as to whether our parents ever fully tell us the truth as to what occurred prior to our birth.

But the book is far richer than this plot outline. For one thing, Peter has been working on a dissertation in law for several years, although he is fallow at the present. He spends some time teaching in Berlin shortly after the wall falls, so Schlink can once again get into the bedeviling identity problems which still afflict German reunification. Peter's major clue comes from a book written by an American political science professor, which affords the opportunity for Schlink (himself a distinguished Humboldt University law professor and former high judge) to dip into some postmodernistic legal deconstruction analysis re morality and law. Not too much of this (see, e.g., pp. 179, 187, 218), but enough to lay out the juxtaposition of issues between the professor and Peter. Ultimately, he concludes the professor is the author of the story fragments that initiated his quest and spends a semester auditing his legal philosophy seminar at Columbia, without disclosing why he is doing so.

Two problems I think afflict the novel in its final quarter. First, an episode involving the seminar participants at a rustic retreat organized by the professor, is transparent, too long, and does not add enough to the story to justify its substantial length. More importantly, the reader waits through 260 pages for the ultimate confrontation between Peter and the professor when he can reveal who he is and what he believes, and we can find out if he is correct or not. It never comes! Despite how much I enjoyed the remainder of the novel, I felt a bit cheated by this development. Nonetheless, this is an extraordinary novel, quite gripping at points, and raising a number of important issues requiring the reader to reflect upon his own experiences and values. And that is the most you can ask a novel to provide you.

a clean and elegant narrative that marries the exploration of character with larger questions of German identity and family loyalty. The ending is awkward and bizarrely out of character with the rest of the book, but proof of its irrelevance is the fact that it still does not diminish the overall value of the novel.