Slow Homecoming [Paperback]

Peter Handke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1988

Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy.

The book begins in America. Writing with the jarring intensity of his early work, Handke introduces Valentin Sorger, a troubled geologist who has gone to Alaska to lose himself in his work, but now feels drawn back home: on his way to Europe he moves in ominous disorientation through the great cities of America. The second part of the book, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” identifies Sorger as a projection of the author, who now writes directly about his own struggle to reconstitute himself and his art by undertaking a pilgrimage to the great mountain that Cézanne painted again and again. Finally, “Child Story” is a beautifully observed, deeply moving account of a new father—not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman—and his love for his growing daughter.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In three interrelated fictions, the author of Repetition describes a sojourn in Alaska, Cezanne's mountain in Provence and a complicated father-daughter relationship. PW found the "sombre, enigmatic" work has reflective power but lacks narrative surge and memorable characterization.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Moving and powerful...with the freshness that only an extraordinary writer can impart.” –Los Angeles Times


______________________________________________
PRAISE FOR HANDKE

“One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers.” –Lawrence Graver, The New York Times

“Peter Handke…perhaps the most interesting young writer in German today.” –Frank Kermode

"There is no denying Handke's willful intensity and knife-like clarity of emotion. He writes from an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebblesÉThe best writer, altogether, in his language." –John Updike, The New Yorker

"His experimental poetry and anarchic, anti-authoritarian work win him a following among Germany's left-wing `1968ers'. Handke aims to strip away unnecessary words and challenge linguistic conventions, developing a spare, robust prose style." –The Guardian

"IMAGINE a cross between Holden Caulfield and Bertolt Brecht, and you'll have a sense of the Austrian novelist, playwright and screenwriter Peter Handke, whose alienation from the phony and harmful adult world is as pure as his esthetic purity is purposefully alienating...As it happened, Handke ended up writing social criticism with a vengeance...though to some degree time-bound tales of angst, have a pained, mysterious beauty. Their alluring tension lies in the little war they prosecute between eloquence of expression and rage at the loss of meaning." –The New York Times

"Peter Handke made his reputation as an important writer with a fierce, icy set of plays and novels: Offending the Audience, Kaspar, The Ride Across Lake Constance, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. Oblique yet startlingly immediate, these works embodied in fresh fictional and dramatic forms concerns that seemed particularly postmodern, notably an obsession (indeed, a disgust) with the way language itself defines and constricts human possibilities." –The New York Times

“The David Byrne of fiction: a writer with a resonant, powerfully direct voice who could invoke the particular Sartrean nausea of postmodern existence in the simplest events.” –The New York Times

“Handke is a securely established star of the German-speaking literary world, ‘the darling of the West German critics,’ and a ‘key figure of his generation.’” –The New York Times

“One of the most original and provocative of contemporary writers.” –The New York Times

“Handke was and is, one of the most eminent narrative and dramatic writers of postwar Europe.” –The Boston Globe

“Peter Handke must be acknowledged as one of the major voices in contemporary fiction.” –Partisan Review

“One awaits with pleasure whatever Peter Handke turns to next…Since the 1960s, he has been a popularly acclaimed novelist, playwright and poet and a long-standing critical success. He now creates a more rarefied, demanding art coupled with a lucid yet mythic affirmation of life.” –The Boston Herald

“In power and vision and range, Peter Handke is the most important new writer on the international scene since Beckett.” –Stanley Kaufmann, Saturday Review

“His prose is reminiscent of the writings of Henry James…a passion for understanding, for grasping the tortured complexities of contemporary life.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Peter Handke achieved the kind of succes de scandale every ambitious young writer dreams of... and Mr. Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde...But Mr. Handke has aged well, and now, as the prolific author of plays, novels, essays, stories and poems, he is regarded as one of the most important writers in German.” —The New York Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Collier Books (June 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0020515308
• ISBN-13: 978-0020515302
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,508,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a Classic; but Worthwhile for Particular (Historical/Cultural) Reasons, November 29, 2011

By 

David Bowen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slow Homecoming (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I stumbled across this book--novel?--at a used book store while on vacation. Incidentally, I had just finished watching the monumental documentary on WWII World at War; I had also recently been reading the early novels of the Romanian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld. So, I was ready to take on the somberness of some postwar German fiction. I understand that the postwar attitudes and sensibilities of Americans and Continental Europeans are dramatically at odds with each other in many respects. However, while I appreciated encountering Handke for a view into the tortured consciousness of those Germanic peoples (Handke is Austrian) born during the war years, I found Slow Homecoming extremely frustrating.

The translation is certainly awkward in many places, using words that are far from contemporary colloquial English (even for 1985). Yet the author's style also keeps his readers at a distance--emotionally, dramatically--which results in an unpleasant, boredom-inducing muffling effect. This is especially a problem in the final section of the `novel,' which concerns the author's relationship to his young daughter.

While I find admirable the author's goal of evading the use of specific place names and personal names, in an attempt to look at the world with a fresh perspective--a strategy that every lover of modern poetry associates with Stevens and his Blue Guitar--the author has his narrator consistently fall into generalizations and clichés, whether he is in Alaska, California, New York, Germany, Austria or France. There are simply no dramatically defined individuals, fleshed out in all their idiosyncrasies and pathos. The author's concerns seem to be too self-centered despite the protagonist's supposed valuing of his daughter above all else.

However, Slow Homecoming is consistently an honest `portrait of the artist as a young man.' There are some interesting insights into the inspiration he received from Cézanne, explored in the second part of the book. Thirdly, the American reader will be exposed to the torment of a conscientious Austrian coming of age in a world where one's parents and parent-culture are completely unreliable, guilty of the worst of atrocities. Handke really seems like someone trying to figure out how to make life meaningful and worthwhile again. Finally, although dramatically null, the section of the book about the father-daughter relationship does offer some unique, personal insights into one of the most important bonds two people can have. It is honest, as harsh as it is affectionate. But again, I feel like I was kept at more than arm's length through a too-impersonal narration, an almost complete remove from dramatic action and dialogue--and of course awkward translation.

Overall, the book's insights are relatively fleeting or perhaps merely too overshadowed by the its greater faults. The naturalistic descriptions of central Alaska are actually very pretty--but again the book, perhaps purposefully, is too (deliberately?) fractured to make these positive aspects outweigh the frustrations of this reading experience.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the narrator is the self-aggrandizing and mystical obfuscation he seems inclined too. He speaks of feelings of transcendent unity or the onrush of cosmic visions without giving his readers the feel of what these (entirely mental) experiences are like. Late in the book, he writes, "Only in sorrow, over an omission or a commission (and then my eyes become magnetic and all-encompassing), does my life expand to epic proportions." This is almost laughably embarrassing. And nothing's "all-encompassing" simply because they say so. There are poets and novelists who I could believe that of--but they would never say, `Hey, look! I am actually omniscient!'

All that said, eventually, I might want to pick up a later Handke volume, to see if his early left-field experimentation matured into a less deliberate, less self-conscious achievement.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Marble Nor the Gilded Halls of Princes, May 28, 2011

By 

Arthur Murphy (Arizona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Slow Homecoming (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I didn't really love or hate this book. The last section, "Child Story", about a father's relationship with his daughter was the best part.