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Slow homecoming door Peter Handke
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Slow homecoming (origineel 1979; editie 2009)

door Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim

Reeksen: Homecoming cycle (1-3)

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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 Ce?zanne 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.… (meer)
Lid:eereed
Titel:Slow homecoming
Auteurs:Peter Handke
Andere auteurs:Ralph Manheim
Info:New York : New York Review Books, c2009.
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Langzame terugkeer door Peter Handke (1979)

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I read somewhere that it was criminal that Handke wasn't translated to any large extent in English. To an extent I fully agree but his books can be a bit of a slog occasionally. It is the lack of names that does it. Who is this Sorger and what are we supposed to make of his life? He seems to be in a distant continent, a geologist perhaps, who goes backwards in his life to Amercia, France, Germany etc. On the way he seems to find or to have found himself or his writerly self. He understands that he is a writer. There are wonderful parts to it - the encounter with mad dog, or is this just depression? There is the last section about a relationship of a father with his young daughter; Cezanne's perfect painting; Mont Sainte-Victoire in France, the beautiful world around us; or perhaps I have got this all wrong. ( )
  jon1lambert | Mar 19, 2020 |
Handke as a Late Romantic

Here are some thoughts on "The Long Way Around," the first and longest of a trilogy of short novels titled Slow Homecoming. Although the novels are short, their language--especially in "The Long Way Around" is dense, and they read slowly in English or German. In this respect "The Long Way Around" feels more like a 350-page novel than a 150-page novel.

The narrator of "The Long Way Around," who is called Sorger (an allegorical name, meaning something like "Person Who Cares"), defines himself largely through his interactions with the Arctic landscape. Handke's prose here is full of tropes of subjectivity, woven into tropes of landscape: it owes the most, I think, to Rilke, but also to Trakl and other modernist nature poets. Sorger, however, claims he isn't working in the Romantic tradition:

"He did not believe in his science as a kind of nature religion; on the contrary, his always 'measured' practice of his profession... was at the same time an exercise in trusting the world, for the measured quality of his technical manipulations but also his personal, everyday movements resided in his constant attempt at meditation..." (p. 8 in the Collier edition of Manheim's translation)

A reader might wonder at this point what "measuring" is, and what "technical manipulations" might be, but at least it's clear that Sorger mixes nonscientific ideas like "trusting" (and "caring," as in his name) with possibly scientific ones. A page later Handke tells us "Sorger never ceased to regard the linguistic formulas of his science as a hoax": science, Sorger thinks, is only about "description and nomenclature," and he is after something less "dubious."

The "measured" practice turns out to be drawing, and the process of drawing turns out to be empathetic consonance with the landscape. According to Benjamin Kunkel, Sorger's "patient and reverent bestowal of attention... resembles geology" (from his introduction to the NYRB edition, quoted from the n+1 site). But this resemblance is so distant that it doesn't really help: Leonardo's landscape drawings, which have also been analyzed as proto-geology, are closer to geology than Sorger's nearly abstract "search for forms."

Sometimes Sorger doesn't even need to draw to achieve his identification with landscape:

"For a moment he had felt the strength to propel his whole self into the bright horizon and there dissolve forever into the undifferentiated unity of sky and earth" (p. 16)

Still, "he preferred drawing to photography, because it was only through drawing that he came to understand the landscape in all its forms" (p. 29). This study of forms, which emerge slowly for him, through the act of meditative drawing, is more from Humboldt than Hermann Weyl: it's a 19th century species of imagination, not a 20th century one. In every landscape, Sorger says, "consciousness gradually creates its own configurations"; the mind needs time "to form ties with it," so that "characteristic forms reveal themselves" (pp. 71, 72)--all straight out of Humboldt, 150 years before Handke wrote "The Long Way Around."

Superimposed on this first-generation Romanticism is late Romanticism, as in Rilke and Trakl, which is especially evident in the coils of self-awareness, in which all natural processes are also processes of self-understanding, and in which interpretation--as in conventional natural science--is to be avoided in favor of "the pure, unexplained description" of "forms" (p. 72). (The second novella in the book, "Mont Sainte-Victoire," has elements of phenomenology, because the Cezanne literature is so infused by Merleau-Ponty's essay, but those elements are overlaid on a foundation of Romanticism--as they are, often, in art historical scholarship which presents itself as phenomenological but is perhaps more deeply Romantic in its first instincts. But that's a subject for another essay.)

In what sense, then, is "The Long Way Around" a postwar (read: modernist or postmodernist) fiction? It seems better understood as one of the last gasps of late Romanticism, in which poetry can only be recovered by the most convoluted writing, the densest and most introspective images, the strongest vigilance against cliches. It has just the slightest touches of postwar sensibility, for example when Sorger concludes that the best he's doing is "not betraying" the world, and creating a "science of peace": an ironic ambition given Handke's later career.

Appendix: a note on Handke's politics

Since politics is what as stifled Handke's career, it's interesting that "The Long Way Around" is weirdly coy about its location. For the first fifty pages it's impossible to tell if Sorger is in the Siberian or North American arctic. He calls the natives "Indians," which is not correct for either continent. He sleeps with an "Indian" woman and gives her a "pet name" (p. 17). She laughs at the "inconceivable notion that there might be another continent" (p. 19): an outrageous European fantasy of isolation. Together they speak a language foreign to both of them: it could be Russian or English. Manheim says Sorger sees "elk " (p. 16) but that's either Handke's or Manheim's error, because it eventually turns out he's been in Alaska. When we're finally given enough information to conclude Sorger's been in Alaska, it's done in a crazily coy way. The narrator flies down to a place on the Pacific coast, "in a different time zone (two hour later)." This is inaccurate -- it would be one hour later -- but it makes the location unambiguous. He makes brief references to "a nation," and finally to the United States (p. 62). All this is in service of Sorger's (and Handke's )attempt to lose himself in a place without history, culture, or a name. It's intensive myth-making, and really unnecessary when it comes to what Sorger actually does in the Arctic community (drawing, sleeping with the "Indian" woman).
  JimElkins | Jul 17, 2016 |
Slow Homecoming is a collection of three novella length pieces (written and published as separate works from 1979-1981) that explore the meaning of home in strikingly different ways. The first, "The Long Way Around," introduces a geologist named Sorger who is living and working in the far north. Sorger's obsession is with place, and as he follows a meandering route in the general direction of his European homeland, via several American towns and cities, we understand that this restless adventurer both craves and fears his place of origin and only feels "at home" when in motion. In "The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire," the author of Sorger's story narrates an account of his struggle to rediscover his art by studying the life and aesthetic philosophy of the artist Paul Cezanne, and draws solace and a kind of wisdom from the mountain in Provence so often revisited in Cezanne's works. And in "Child Story," a young father raising his daughter alone seeks a place where they can be at home with each other as they negotiate the hazardous byways of early childhood. The writing throughout this book is lush, closely observed, and filled with intricate detail. "Child Story" could best be described as an extended prose poem. In 1985, Slow Homecoming confirmed Peter Handke's reputation as one of the most deeply probing and original writers of his generation. ( )
  icolford | Aug 1, 2011 |
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» Andere auteurs toevoegen (4 mogelijk)

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Peter Handkeprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Kunkel, BenjaminIntroductieSecundaire auteursommige editiesbevestigd
Manheim, RalphVertalerSecundaire auteursommige editiesbevestigd
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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 Ce?zanne 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.

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