Slow Homecoming (Magill Book Reviews)

“The Long Way Around” tells the story of Valentin Sorger, an Austrian geologist who, estranged from his native land, is doing field work in a village near the Arctic Circle. Challenged by the vast uniformity of the geological space and the barely formed social space of this Alaskan outpost, Sorger develops a keener sense for the subtle configurations around him. As he returns to Europe by way of California, Colorado, and finally New York’s Manhattan, Sorger sees his power for the discovery of humanizing forms increase with the complexity of the inhuman situations he encounters.

In “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire,” a first-person narrator recounts his pilgrimage to the mountain of Southern France immortalized in the paintings of Paul Cezanne. Having learned to view reality with Cezanne’s eyes, the narrator approaches, in another long way around, landscapes in Paris and Berlin before concluding with a description of a forest near Salzburg, Peter Handke’s present home.

The final section, “Child Story,” is an autobiographical account of a father rearing his daughter, first in the atmosphere of his faltering marriage in Germany, then in the isolation of his self-imposed exile in Paris. The author, guided again and again by the child’s innocence, allows her, after several years, to return home and finally follows her, thus repeating the pattern of uprooting and homecoming for a third time.

Though occasionally marred by a tone which seems to mistake self-aggrandizement for sublimity and supercilious intolerance for the rage of the just, Handke’s immersion into the shapes of things creates word paintings of an intense yet sparse beauty rarely to be found in modern literature.

Bibliography

Firda, Richard Arthur. Peter Handke. New York: Twayne, 1993. Covers Handke’s work through the tetralogy (chapter 5) and beyond. Annotated bibliography.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie’s Journey Home. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Places Handke’s work in the context of postmodern literature. Useful for understanding the themes of postmodern literature.

Modern Fiction Studies 36, no. 3 (Autumn, 1990). Provides different perspectives on Slow Homecoming. Hugo Caviola’s article is especially informative.

Schlueter, June, ed. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. Provides an overview of Handke’s work up to 1981. Includes an interview with Handke.

Wesche, Ulrich. “Peter Handke, Walker Percy, and the End of Modernity.” Essays in Literature 19, no. 2 (Fall, 1992): 291-297. Establishes a link between the philosophies of Handke and Percy (two of whose books Handke has translated into German). Addresses the postmodernist crisis in language and Handke’s desire for the transparency of words.