Slow homecoming - Peter Handke

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 Czanne 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.