Slow Homecoming (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

I stumbled across this book--novel?--at a used book store while on vacation. Incidentally, I had just finished watching the monumental documentary on WWII World at War; I had also recently been reading the early novels of the Romanian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld. So, I was ready to take on the somberness of some postwar German fiction. I understand that the postwar attitudes and sensibilities of Americans and Continental Europeans are dramatically at odds with each other in many respects. However, while I appreciated encountering Handke for a view into the tortured consciousness of those Germanic peoples (Handke is Austrian) born during the war years, I found Slow Homecoming extremely frustrating.

The translation is certainly awkward in many places, using words that are far from contemporary colloquial English (even for 1985). Yet the author's style also keeps his readers at a distance--emotionally, dramatically--which results in an unpleasant, boredom-inducing muffling effect. This is especially a problem in the final section of the `novel,' which concerns the author's relationship to his young daughter.

While I find admirable the author's goal of evading the use of specific place names and personal names, in an attempt to look at the world with a fresh perspective--a strategy that every lover of modern poetry associates with Stevens and his Blue Guitar--the author has his narrator consistently fall into generalizations and clichés, whether he is in Alaska, California, New York, Germany, Austria or France. There are simply no dramatically defined individuals, fleshed out in all their idiosyncrasies and pathos. The author's concerns seem to be too self-centered despite the protagonist's supposed valuing of his daughter above all else.

However, Slow Homecoming is consistently an honest `portrait of the artist as a young man.' There are some interesting insights into the inspiration he received from Cézanne, explored in the second part of the book. Thirdly, the American reader will be exposed to the torment of a conscientious Austrian coming of age in a world where one's parents and parent-culture are completely unreliable, guilty of the worst of atrocities. Handke really seems like someone trying to figure out how to make life meaningful and worthwhile again. Finally, although dramatically null, the section of the book about the father-daughter relationship does offer some unique, personal insights into one of the most important bonds two people can have. It is honest, as harsh as it is affectionate. But again, I feel like I was kept at more than arm's length through a too-impersonal narration, an almost complete remove from dramatic action and dialogue--and of course awkward translation.

Overall, the book's insights are relatively fleeting or perhaps merely too overshadowed by the its greater faults. The naturalistic descriptions of central Alaska are actually very pretty--but again the book, perhaps purposefully, is too (deliberately?) fractured to make these positive aspects outweigh the frustrations of this reading experience.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the narrator is the self-aggrandizing and mystical obfuscation he seems inclined too. He speaks of feelings of transcendent unity or the onrush of cosmic visions without giving his readers the feel of what these (entirely mental) experiences are like. Late in the book, he writes, "Only in sorrow, over an omission or a commission (and then my eyes become magnetic and all-encompassing), does my life expand to epic proportions." This is almost laughably embarrassing. And nothing's "all-encompassing" simply because they say so. There are poets and novelists who I could believe that of--but they would never say, `Hey, look! I am actually omniscient!'

All that said, eventually, I might want to pick up a later Handke volume, to see if his early left-field experimentation matured into a less deliberate, less self-conscious achievement.

I didn't really love or hate this book. The last section, "Child Story", about a father's relationship with his daughter was the best part.

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