Repetition (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

“A quarter of a century, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother.” Thus begins REPETITION, the story of a journey. From the vantage point of 1985, the narrator, Filip Kobal, recalls a trip that he made in June, 1960, from his native Austria to Slovenia, in Yugoslavia, where his older brother, Gregor, studied for three years at an agricultural college prior to World War II. Returning to Austria, Gregor was drafted by the German army, in which he was serving when he disappeared. Filip is a student, not quite twenty years old, at the time of his journey in Slovenia. Following in his brother’s footsteps, he is also exploring their common heritage, for the Kobals trace their ancestry to an earlier Gregor Kobal, leader of a Slovenian peasant revolt in the early eighteenth century.

One of the earliest forms of storytelling is the travel narrative--fiction, nonfiction, or a mixture of the two--in which the traveler returns home with fabulous adventures to recount. In its design, REPETITION pays homage to this tradition: The narrative begins with Filip’s border-crossing into Yugoslavia and concludes with his return to his village and his family. Filip’s adventures, however, are quite different from those of the traditional travel narrative: They are adventures of the spirit.

In the novel’s most extraordinary sequence, Filip reads in a Slovenian-German dictionary which once belonged to his brother and is overwhelmed by “the epic of words.” He sees the Slovenian words marked by his brother as a collection of fairy tales: “Around every word I came across in my ruminations, a world took shape, as much around ’an empty chestnut husk’ as around ’the wet tobacco left at the bottom of a pipe.’” At a time when many writers are proclaiming the inadequacy of language, Handke suggests that there is a word for every nuance of reality. This unforgettable tribute to the power of language and storytelling confirms Handke’s place as one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, May 15, 1988, p. 1571.

Chicago Tribune. July 3, 1988, XIV, p. 5.

The Christian Science Monitor. July 8, 1988, p. 18.

The Guardian. August 5, 1988, p. 22.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, April 1, 1988, p. 479.

Library Journal. CXIII, June 1, 1988, p. 140.

New Statesman and Society. I, August 5, 1988, p. 38.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, August 7, 1988, p. 11.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIII, April 29, 1988, p. 64.

San Francisco Chronicle. June 19, 1988, p. REV11.

The Village Voice. XXXIII, June 14, 1988, p. 61.