By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke
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.