Slow Homecoming

By Peter Handke
Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim
Introduction by Benjamin Kunkel

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 Cezanne 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.

Reviews

A leading literary figure in the first generation of Germans to grow up after the war...He is a man of real intellectual power and sometimes visionary insight. His fingers are never far from the pulse...Slow Homecoming is...a difficult, contested, intellectual, and spiritual journey which it is impossible not to respect and honor...In short, it presents a trayful of the prime hors d’oeuvres of life in our merry postmodern age.
— The Washington Post

Slow Homecoming, Peter Handke as German literature's last surviving romantic, a modern day solitary-cum-nature poet...An intense and utterly absorbing book.
— The Sunday Times (London)

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

Also see:

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams By Peter Handke Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides "In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the author confronts his mother’s suicide in a compelling story that is like an explanation of a recurrent dream, a dream so vividly expressed it becomes our dream." —Chicago Sun Times

Short Letter, Long Farewell By Peter Handke Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim Introduction by Greil Marcus American myth and American reality come to a head in Handke's spare and dreamlike 1972 novel, in which a young Austrian alternately pursues and flees his ex-wife, culminating in a Hollywood ending.

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