Repetition

by Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Set in 1960, this novel tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, 20th Century, Literature, Germany, Novels, Contemporary

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Peter Handke (* 6. Dezember 1942 in Griffen, Kärnten) ist ein österreichischer Schriftsteller und Übersetzer.

Peter Handke is an Avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. He has also collaborated with German director Wim Wenders, writing the script for The Wrong Move and co-writing the screenplay for Wings of Desire.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A snake skin glittering on the path! What does it tell the passing wanderer of the snake that left it there?

Once it was the defining shape of the snake itself, the link between the essence of its being and its contact with the outer world. But as the snake grew, and expanded, the skin got too tight, restraining the development rather than protecting it. So it shed the skin and left it on the path, a reminder for the wanderer that there might be a snake somewhere, maybe, which once fit into the skin, but not anymore. A trace of a former snake: terrifying, fascinating, elusive, somewhere else hiding.

The snake skin that Filip Kobal comes across on his wanderings in the last part of the novel symbolises to me what the novel itself is about: looking at the past, the lost parts of oneself, trying to understand former selves by describing the discarded skins left on the path.

Zooming in and out, the narrator moves between tiny details of old personal memories and wide national horizons, changing focus over and over. He even changes from first person to third person narrative, whenever he sees himself from a different perspective - depending on whether he looks at himself from the outside or the inside. Language itself conveys meaning, and it is as elusive as memory, as open and free as the path he chooses when he leaves his village to discover the world. And when he returns back home after his journey, the first sign of home is found in the reassuring familiarity of his native tongue.

Reading Handke’s multilayered story is challenging at times, and it requires the reader to let go of traditional concepts of plot, setting and characterisation. Moving in circles, the family of the narrator is dissected, analysed and mirrored in the mind of the narrator. Documents gain symbolic power to represent lost members of family, just like the skin of the snake represents the snake without disclosing its later whereabouts.

It is a novel about alienation, about feeling both at home and lost in the world, about searching the past to make the present comprehensible, and the path into the future clearer. It is a story of paradise lost and found, and regained, but at a cost: knowledge and ignorance are kept in balance, and coming home does not mean shedding the skin of being a foreigner. Freedom to wander and freedom to come back - but the other side of the medal of freedom is detachment. Alienation from self, in self, and within the community - a snakey journey through life, slithering along in the grass, as a predator and victim, shedding skins and leaving traces.

Not sure if I recommend it, but it has been a tremendous language journey - maybe worth repeating? It would be a different journey - recapturing the text would put the emphasis on new discoveries, for sure. Wiederholung!

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

2019 Nobel Prize Winner Update

First there was Proust, then there was Handke. I shall try to explain.

Repetition is a poststructuralist ur-text of sorts, a landmark, a foundational meditation on language, phenomenology, and the work of memory. As Filib Kobal, Handke's geographically and linguistically displaced narrator states: "I look on memory as more than a haphazard thinking back—as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention." And isn't that one of the lessons that Proust had taught us, echoed by the work of Freud—namely, that memory is work but a repetitive process worth undertaking for the freedom, the "greater life," and the individuality that springs from this very active process?

Proust's Recherche is perhaps the seminal modernist text to cite memory as its thematic concern, and, more specifically, how memory can inform an individual's relation to others, their surroundings, and even, in the end, alter the spatial and temporal landscapes of their lives. Handke's project in Repetition is similar; as such, it is no surprise that he titles his work after Freud's concept of Wiederholungszwang, or repetition-compulsion. Related to trauma, Freud's concept insists on the act of recollection and active memory as repeated forces to overcome traumatic events in lieu of a neurotic repression of them.

Isn't this what Proust's Narrator is doing in the Recherche? And, more to the point here, this is certainly what Handke's Kobal is doing in Repetition; indeed, Handke's situation of Kobal in a deterritorialized borderland between cultures, languages, and histories is critical to the work of memory; in addition, Handke channels Proust in Kobal's iterative considerations of place-names which constitute both an "objective" history (i.e., what the books say, what is passed down by word of mouth) and a "subjective" one, too (i.e., what is experienced as truth by the individual, what the place causes "the self"to be, to become).

A twenty-year-old, who has left his native Austria for Yugoslavia in order to follow the path of his long-absent (and presumed dead) brother, Kobal relies on the stories from his past—his seminary days; life in a Carinthian village where both German and Slovene words were part of daily conversation; and a post-war existence that excludes him from the traumatic histories of those with whom he lives—and also the stories he unearths in two books his brother Gregor has left behind: an agricultural journal, largely concerned with the methods of planting and care of a bountiful and fruitful orchard, and a German-Slovenian dictionary.

This latter book provides Kobal with a deep portrait of the interior life of his brother, and also cause him to confront the trauma of living in the interstitial space between language, citizenship, cultural, familial, and national identity, and a host of other conflicts which Handke allows his narrator to explore through interacting—almost tangibly, tracing them in the air—with words. In Repetition, the working-through comes from Kobal's realization that language is not a stable or static structure, but one that can be used to render deeply personal and subjective experiences into a more exacting and presentable form: a form that, in the end, is able to unite us with others, even despite the inherent trappings of language. In spite of our linguistic differences, Handke seems to argue, we all have the same personalized relationship with words at our disposal, there to help us work through, come to terms, and, in the end, overcome by means of perpetual and ongoing work.

While Proust's text is the modernist literary ur-text dealing with memory and its relation to trauma, Handke's is the poststructuralist literary ur-text dealing with this same major theme, and its Lacanian reworking of Freud are present but extremely subtle—e.g., the interchanging of words for objects; the insistence on signs as incomplete according to a more structural, Saussurean model of language—but work to position Repetition within a genre of largely Austrian-produced works from the mid-1980s onward dealing with memory and phenomenology alongside these questionings of linguistic and territorial borders. Handke's background as a dramatist links him, for example, to the narrative/monologic experiments one finds in the work of Thomas Bernhard (more his contemporary, but the argument, I hope, still holds) and Elfriede Jelinek; also, his influence on writers like W.G. Sebald, Josef Winkler, and even those working in a similar vein (Teju Cole's Open City comes immediately to mind) demonstrates how critical his work is to literature being produced today on topics we have only just begun to explore—and, luckily, topics that are so ineffable and even problematic that one needn't fear a dearth of such works any time in the near future.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Handke is capable of producing some of the most delicate and lasting images in his prose. Late in the novel, narrator Filip Kobal, and later in life, reimagines his walks up the hills of the Karst region and his encounters with the winds. The wind, he says, takes him by the armpits and raises him up making his climb easier, whether as a headwind or a tailwind. A moment earlier, he says that this wind which comes from the sea only delivers with it an imaginary hint of its saltiness. But there on the summer slopes, it raises the aroma of all the herbs and plants growing there; these he says are real.

Real and imagined form a tension in this story. I confess, I have read this now three times. And each time, I read with a focus on something new. It is so richly detailed, so intricately constructed, that I can only concentrate on a few pages, or one dimension, at a time before surrendering to a kind of exhaustion from the effort. That has happened each time. I first read it decades ago. I saw it then as a young man’s adventure to search for his brother, a kind of familial kinship story. But I missed some of the significant details of who his family are, where they come from, and their sense of not fitting neatly into the southern Austrian alpine village where the narrator grew up near the border of Slovenia (also referred to as Yugoslavia, depending on the line of enquiry.)

The Kobals it seems had been in southern Austria since a rebellious ancestor Gregor Kobal led a peasant revolt in 1713, failed, and was executed along with his colleagues, resulting in the Kobals fleeing to what is now Austria. We learn this early, at the point at which Filip steps (as a very young man) across the border from Austria into Slovenia (this is in Iron Curtain days) in search of his brother who made the same crossing twenty-odd years earlier at a similar age. (Filip has two siblings a generation older than him) This parallel sets up that same paradigm of real and imagined. The brother left before WW2, served in that war, disappeared, and Filip can only recreate a relationship through the documentary traces his brother left behind. There are three of these documents – an apple orchard where the brother practiced his agricultural college skills located in a subsided little valley where an underground watercourse caused the land to collapsed and never visible when looking across the landscape. It remains hidden until you stand over it and in it. The other is the notebooks from agricultural college and the Slovenian/German dictionary his brother used to practice his new/old language, ticking off words as he went along. But Filip can only know his brother from the images that this documentary evidence conjures in him. He was a toddler when the brother left.

Why is this Slovenia/Austria divide so prominent, I kept asking myself. It is everywhere. When I first read the opening pages of Filip’s first step into this new land, I realised quickly that Handke has always written against the current of history. He was one of those rebellious authors Austria produced in the middle of the last century, Bernhard and Bachman are among the others, challenging power and authority through literature. Yet this novel is intimate, told like a memoir of a loving younger brother yearning and seeking. It is delicate in its layering of image on image, action on action with thoughts and feelings travelling on these images as the young man travels on both the land and in the mind. His most vivid sense, if it is one, is imagination. He interacts with landscapes to feel the faces and actions of the inhabitants of towns he passes, the texture and materials of buildings and the world of nature. He journeys through all these objects and observations attempting to know them, and to know something of his brother. It is a most striking book in that sense, sometimes I feel like I’m reading a 19thC novel by a Bronte, Hardy or G Eliot.

What is it about Slovenia? No matter how long the Kobals had lived in southern Austria, the distance between the locals and the Kobals is expressed through the father in the following way:

The household’s present, its daily life, was dominated by my father’s prisoner mentality. His being a stranger in the village made him a domestic tyrant.

Correspondingly, the father spoke German cleansed of local dialect:

passed onto everybody else in the family

It's a permanent punishment to keep purging corruptions in the German language, purifying it, then ensuring no future generation of his introduces corruptions. An exile (and an immigrant) is always looking to prove themselves. Multi-generational factors are always at play here. Even Filip's two siblings are so much older as to be a generation removed from him.

While the father could speak Slovene it could only erupt into being: As he regularly showed when talking to himself, often very loudly, in his workshop, he himself spoke it in his innermost consciousness, but he felt forbidden to let it out or pass it on to his children.

Handke painstakingly builds a picture of cultural alienation of a deep historical nature, of living a perpetual exile on the only land the (his) Kobals have ever occupied while carrying this cultural artefact of a home language around like a carapace, a home, a weight, a burden, a point of endless differentiation. One cannot settle in this land because it is forever a ‘foreign (Austrian) land’ and language. This picture perfectly explained my own sense of belonging nowhere. It takes a novel of this depth to explain an intangible, unknowable thing. I think Fernando Pessoa with all his examinations of unknowable states of being does something similar, though in more abstract imagery than Handke does. Bifurcated language and the intimate relationship to this divided self, incessantly haunts the mind.

Filip has two ages in the book. He is the young man barely 20 who crosses the border, and the middle-aged man twenty-five years later, examining his former self the way he examined the world of his lost brother. Their journeys parallel in time. One is real, the other unknowable and only recreated through a personal journey through the imagination.

Language, acquiring Slovenian, becomes part of the brother quest. Filip follows his brother’s use of the Slovenian/German dictionary as though following a path through mountains, villages, towns, landscapes. He accumulates words as an adult, studying their nuanced meaning in this new language, explaining like a pedagogue to his reader meanings he had no idea of and states he realises seem only possible in this new Slovenian. As though he can never truly know them. The individual character of language, its untranslatability from its source, is a fascinating journey in itself. Though it seems only academic since it is abstracted from the reality of growing up with it as a lived language. It’s like saying did you know they have this and that word in Slovenian for all sorts of weird and whacky matters. He knows he can only pursue language so far. He reaches a limit, which returns him to that state like his father of permanent exile. Neither in one place nor another.

I have marked this book in hundreds of places. It is only 246 pages long with large print and open line structure. I wish I had the time and place to write out dozens of quotes. It is such a worthwhile reading experience. Like no other. Expansive an unsettling at the same time.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The unlikely eventual existence of WG Sebald's four novels presupposes the writing of this book. But that's saying it all backwards, isn't it? The fact is Handke wrote first, and Sebald took what he started to its illogical conclusion with a magically sustained prose. Handke can be a bit dull and dour, his prose a bit labored, and his revelations a bit forced. But that is a given. He's also intensely and seriously sincere, to the point of humorlessness. But that's also something I have a love/hate relationship with. I admire his guts: to write so humorlessly requires true fearlessness. But what he achieves is a rhythm that is the beginning of enticement, if only he had more charm. Parts of this book were amazing!

In the first section, the narrator recounts his family past, Rinkenberg, the Austrian village he comes from, and all his mixed emotions having to do with that. This was the most convincing section, because he was not trying to convince me of anything. The paralysis of prose would practically sing at times when an image came out of the clauses (closet?) so unexpectedly and so senselessly, but gleamed bright in the sun with significance. Some of his descriptions transcended description because they were always more than surface descriptions. That's what I mean by significance. Everything means so much to this narrator. When you see the blind window the way he sees it, it bowls you over.

In the second section, the narrator is on foot and in trains in search of his older brother who he's never met but has heard countless stories about. He is in Slovenia, and you realize why that first section was necessary. Knowing where he was from makes this section so much more powerful, since much of what he sees holds its power precisely because of its difference. You rejoice with him at being finally away from home, where he can truly feel at home with the Slovenes who had no real home. (Then there's the other part about how his whole family was likely Slovene, and one of their ancestors may have been a leader in a revolt). Much of this section deals with language and history, and two little books that his brother left behind: a copybook filled with school notes, and a Slovenian-German dictionary with check marks next to the words his brother had a fondness for.

Random story: I was having a nice lunch at the bar when a lady sat down next to me. She had a French accent and we started talking about books and travel. Somehow the topic veered towards Barcelona, a city I've stayed in and loved. Then, out of nowhere she says: "I love Barcelona, but I hate that they speak Catalan. It's just so annoying, it's like if all of America spoke English except one city, and I understand about their heritage, but it's not even a beautiful language," I almost choked on my food. So unexpected was this outburst, so utterly shocked was I at this proposition, that I had no way of responding. Would she have rather the whole city change their language for her convenience? Did she think there was no cultural, artistic, or historic value in a language's preservation, no matter her personal aesthetic judgements on its 'beauty'?

The end of the second section of Repetition dealt with exactly this: the beauty of a language, the pure abstract thing that a language is, an experience conjurer, that it must be appreciated purely for its own existence and not just for any practical usage. I want to show that lady this section of the book, but she would likely not have understood. To her, a language is purely functional. But Filip Kobal, our narrator, is (like me) a sad-sack dreamer, a hopelessly impractical wanderer, and a storyteller.

In the last section, our narrator reaches the Karst, a region of stunning beauty and wondrous natural formations. Caves abound. But his meditations, until this point quite moving, have perhaps a quality of over-reaching. He is trying to say something a bit too much, something about storytelling, and about finding his brother who he never finds, and the significance of it all was too much for me. It felt forced, like a coming of age story that happens all in his head. Or like trying to recount a dream's emotions without any of the dream imagery.

Whereas earlier versions of this worked for me, like the blind window image, they worked even without logic, despite logic. I could understand the pure emotion of something that strikes one for myriad unexplainable reasons, not unlike Proust's madeleines, and guides one back to one's home where a scene unfolds almost as in a dream. A revelation out of nowhere. A something in real life that feels separated out in your memory, as if someone else had lived it. But here at the end of the book, the stretching for revelation was not accompanied by any specific image, or with anything really. The ending, with its hifalutin harping on storytelling seemed more like Handke putting his agenda down, rather than the narrator's own organic musing.

[نیکزاد نورپناه · Rating 4 out of 5]

این رمان را من از یادداشتی که زبالد* برایش نوشته پیدا کردم. یادداشت را تقریباً ۲۰ سال بعد از خواندن کتاب نوشته. علاوه بر کلی تمجید، جایی در یادداشتش نوشته به مرور برایش مشخص شده که این کتاب «چقدر» رویش تأثیر گذاشته. حالا که رمان هاندکه را خوانده‌ام بنظرم رمانهای زبالد، آن شکل یا فرم بخصوص نوشتنش صرفاً تقلیدی‌ست از هاندکه. تقلید بدی نیست. اما تقلید است و البته چیزی هم بهش اضافه کرده. (کناوسگارد** هم مثال دیگری‌ست از نویسنده‌ای که خیلی تأثیر گرفته از هاندکه. زبالد چیزی به این قالب روایت اضافه کرده. کناوسگارد ساده‌اش کرده. مردمی و همه‌فهم.)

اما رمان هاندکه به خودی خود برایم چیز عجیبی بود. بعد از مدتها کتابی می‌خواندم که هیجان‌زده‌ام کرده بود. داستان جوانی‌ست ۲۰ ساله. پسری از خانواده‌ای مهاجر که در اتریش زندگی می‌کنند. در نزدیکی مزر یوگسلاوی. خود خانواده هم اصالتاً مال یوگسلاوی هستند. مرد جوان چند هفته‌ای به سرزمین آبا و اجدادی‌اش سفر می‌کند. این کتاب شرح سفرش است. شرح کشف تاریخ و همزمان کشف خودش است. شاید می‌شد به جای «تکرار» اسم رمانش را بگذارد «ریشه‌ها». لابلایش گذشته‌ی راوی هم هست. از سالهای مدرسه‌اش. از اولین تجربه‌هایش. از طرد شدن، تنهایی، به‌رسمیت شناخته شدن. هاندکه راحت و بی‌قید و بند از تداعی استفاده می‌کند. یا شاید بشود گفت جوری «طبیعی». گاهی گم می‌شدم که کجاست، کدام زمان، کدام مکان. اما صفحه پشت صفحه کماکان در همان «مجرای طبیعی روایت» حرکت می‌کردم. هاندکه در این کار تبحر بخصوصی دارد. این همان قالبی‌ست که زبالد ازش وام گرفته. جفت‌شان نرم این کار را می‌کنند. خواندن نوشته‌هایشان (در مورد هر چیزی که می‌خواهد باشد) شبیه این است که در محضر کسی باشی که «حرف زدن» بلد است، حرفش هم کشش قصه را داشته باشد، هم گریز و انحراف داشته باشد، و هم اینکه گوینده خودش هم «صاحب‌سخن» باشد، یعنی منی که شنونده‌ام اعتمادی درونی داشته باشم که عمرم پای این منبر هدر نمی‌رود. در ثلث اول کتاب، راوی از کودکی‌اش می‌گوید. تعریف دقیق از خودغریبی، بیگانگی یا الیناسیون سخت است. اما عوضش این بخش اول رمان هاندکه نمونه‌ی اعلای روایتی‌ست با چنین مضامینی. روایتی که ریشه‌های خیلی از گره‌گوره‌های امروزمان را در کودکی می‌یابد، شکارشان می‌کند، با انگشت فشارشان می‌دهد. همذات‌پنداری با این بخش هم ساده است. در بخش‌های بعدی ماجرا کمی پیچیده‌تر می‌شود. حین کشف سرزمین قدیمش، زبان قدیمش را هم کشف می‌کند و از زبان مادری می‌گوید. از اینکه چگونه «دیدن» و دریافت ما از دنیا نهایتاً محبوس است در حدود زبان‌مان. از این می‌گوید که چطور زبان‌ها و کلمات‌شان آینه‌ی زندگی هر قومی هستند. کل تاریخ‌شان را می‌شود همین‌طور فهمید. از ورای اینها راوی هر چه از سفرش می‌گذرد بیشتر به «فعلیت» می‌رسد. تنها ایرادی که به ذهنم می‌رسد این است که از نیمه‌ی دوم کتاب دیگر تقریباً می‌دانی آخرش به کجا منتهی خواهد شد. این ضعف است. از جایی به بعد دیگر کلیت داستان و انتهای قوس روایت کنجکاوم نمی‌کرد. اما با اینحال همین که چطور می‌خواهد به آنجا برسد نوع دیگری از کنجکاوی را درم فعال کرده بود. چون نثرش در سطح جمله و پاراگراف کماکان غیرقابل‌پیش‌بینی‌ست و در طول کتاب بارها و بارها غافلگیرم کرد. ‌در نهایت اینکه شوق بقیه‌ی کتاب‌هایش را دارم.

*Sebald
**Knausgard

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

What a strange experience it was to read this book. For at least the first half of the book every page felt so heavy to me. I could only read a few pages at a time. At the halfway mark or thereabouts, despairing of my inability to connect with what felt to me like Handke's leaden prose, I read Jimmy's review. Heartened by his experience, I forged on and eventually somewhere in the second section I grew more interested in what Handke had to say, specifically about language. And then the final section drew me fully in, allowing me to read the bulk of it to the end in one sitting. Now, it's possible this was simply a case of the wrong book at the wrong time. Perhaps at a different point in my reading life I would have enjoyed it from cover to cover. But, as it were, I feel I could have been content to read only the second half of the book. What I cannot know, however, is what that second half would mean without the context of the first half. So...in the end, I am glad I read the entire book but I have nothing more to say about it and no stars in my pocket to assign.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

W.G. Sebald considered "Repetition" one of the high points of European fiction. It's also an obvious influence and model for his own fiction. Sebald's uncollected essay "Across the Border" beautifully unpacks what makes this book so remarkable. It's really the only review you need to read. Download it here: https://thelastbooks.org/wordpress/wp...

This is an exceedingly gentle novel about the pleasures of nature, reconciling with your past, and finding a place in society, though I find myself wrestling with it's more romantic echoes about Yugoslavia - and how reading backwards from the present day they offer fleeting forebodings of Handke's later dire personal politics.

4.5 stars

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A full review to come on this complex and intriguing book.

Filip Kobal, twenty years old, crosses into Yugoslavia leaving for the first time the hard working earnest life of his village, his homeland of Austria behind. There rests the laborers, the strict ruled lines of the Seminary he was sent to, the hapless life of an unloving father, a dying mother, and a mute sister lolling in a bemused catatonia consisting of sitting and watching. There is no reflection of him. The mirror hoisted by neighbors, townspeople, his own family, does not take into account the sensitive perceptiveness of his imaginative mind. Wherever he looks the mirror is blank. He does not speak their language nor they his. His only relationship is with a school teacher who specializes in fairy tales. Alone, he crosses the border seeking his missing brother, carrying the brother’s two books, a dictionary and a journal. This brother, blind in one eye perhaps has gone AWOL from the army leaving the life of the military and its beleaguered aims and/or the life of the world?

Where to find others like him, where to find his, self? How to live with this aloneness and separation especially when realizing the need to have others in order for this sought self to emerge. What he has are words, words describing objects and experiences but are not the objects and experiences themselves. There are though dreams and from those dreams emerge stories and from those stories an imaginative path to truths. Never ending paths. Paths trod alone. Each step brings the purpose of meaning. Is there a way of describing this to the hardworking laborers of his village? A way of explaining any of this to anyone? Boundaries have been set and also dissolved.

This holy scroll of a tale sets out to live the life, the experience of Filip, whose existence lies in the world of memories and imagination, as borders and boundaries lift away.

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es passiert mir selten, dass ich so von der Brillianz eines Buches überzeugt bin, und ich dennoch fast durchgehend einen solchen Widerwillen gegen es hege. Dieser Widerwillen richtet sich vor allem gegen die Hauptfigur, wie sie im ersten Teil entworfen wird und die offensichtlich große Ähnlichkeit mit Handke hat. Nun gibt es viele fiktionale Figuren, die keine große Sympathie hervorrufen und darin liegt oft ihre literarische Qualität – dass sie eben nicht auf schnöde Identifikation abzielen. Auch viele große Schriftsteller waren keine sympathischen Zeitgenossen – ich würde mit Goethe oder Thomas Mann genauso wenig ein Bier trinken wollen wie mit Handke. Daran mache ich aber meine Beurteilung eines Werkes nicht fest. Und wie sich das Verhältnis von Werk und Biografie eines Autors gestaltet, ist mal so, mal so, aber einen Zusammenhang gibt es immer. Bei Handke ist der nun besonders ausgeprägt und dass ich einige Kapitel von Herwigs Biografie Meister Der Dämmerung: Peter Handke: Eine Biographie gelesen habe, hat mich vielleicht zu sehr auf eine bestimmte Spur geschickt.

Es ist der erste Teil des Buches, in dem sich mein Unbehagen etabliert. Dieser sehr sensibel beobachtende Filip Kobal ist sehr auf sich selbst konzentriert, auf seine Wahrnehmungen, auf seine Befindlichkeiten. Allerdings wird hier aus meiner Sicht überstrapaziert, dass er sich stets von anderen beobachtet fühlt, oft unter der Annahme, dass die anderen nur Schlechtes in ihm sehen. Das geht ein paar Mal gut, man kann sich als Leser sogar hier und da an eigene Ausgrenzungserfahrungen, vielleicht als Schüler, erinnern; aber irgendwann wird es mir zu viel. Ich verliere die Überzeugung, dass es sich noch um eine ehrliche Wahrnehmung handelt. Mir scheint es eher wie eine bewusste Übertreibung, ein gezieltes sich Ausgrenzen und Besonders fühlen. Natürlich ist es genau dieser Zustand, die es dem Erzähler oder Kobal so erlaubt, eine ganz besondere Sicht, eine ganz besondere Sprache zu entwickeln. Dennoch. Warum kann ich diese Figur nicht annehmen? Ich fürchte fast, Kobal erinnert mich an jemanden, den ich nicht mag. Und dabei kann ich nicht einmal sagen, ob es sich um jemanden handelt, der mir in der Realität begegnet ist oder wiederum um eine fiktionale Figur. Dann aber finde ich überraschend doch wieder etwas Sympathie, wenn Kobal seine Unbeholfenheit bei allen möglichen alltäglichen Arbeiten beschreibt.

Der zweite Teil hat mir am besten gefallen. Kobals Beobachtungen gelten in stärkerem Maße der ihn umgebenden Natur – diese Schilderungen sind wirklich beeindruckend – und es geht häufig um Sprache und Erzählen. Man kann fast bei der Entwicklung eines literarischen Konzepts zusehen. Dann wieder gibt es dermaßen assoziative, philosophische Gedanken, dass man den Inhalt beim Lesen vernachlässigt und – nur halbverstehend – sich dem Sog der Sprache hingibt, selbst Assoziationen nachhängt, die aber noch während des Lesens wieder verblassen. Wenn ich dieses Buch nicht in der Gruppe gelesen hätte und anhand der Assoziationen der anderen den ein oder anderen Gedanken wieder hätte einfangen können, wäre mir vermutlich alles zwischen den Fingern zerronnen.

Der dritte Teil dagegen, immer noch sprachlich interessant, fällt aber hinter dem zweiten deutlich ab. Da gibt es den ein oder anderen interessanten Gedanken zu Krieg und zum Soldatsein, aber die lange Erörterung des Karsts enttäuscht, gerade weil vorangegangene Naturbeschreibungen so viel eindringlicher sind. Was ich hier aber mochte, wie sich Bilder einer exotischeren, fiktionalen Welt mit der slowenischen Realität vermischen, wie Richard Widmark erscheint oder von der Indianerin gesprochen wird. In Verbindung mit dem Karst kommen mir da Bilder aus Winnetou-Filmen in den Sinn, die ja im damaligen Jugoslawien, ja zum Teil auch in Slowenien, gedreht wurden.

Das scheint mir überhaupt der wichtigste Aspekt des Buches zu sein: Seine Anschlussfähigkeit an eigene Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Lektüren. Es ist ein stellenweise mühsam zu lesendes Buch, aber in jedem Fall ein sehr lohnendes.

Nach der Lektüre des Buches habe ich ein paar Rezensionen gelesen. Über diese hier musste ich manchmal schmunzeln: http://www.zeit.de/1986/41/der-evange.... Einerseits fühlte ich mich Henrichs verbunden, da er das Buch gelegentlich auch als Zumutung empfand, andererseits fand ich manche Kritik übertrieben, wenn nicht gar völlig unzutreffend. Aber beweist das am Ende nicht, wie viele unterschiedliche Rezeptionsmöglichkeiten hier angeboten werden? Und streitbar zu sein ist ja nicht die schlechteste Eigenschaft von Kunstwerken.

[David M]

Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasize something?

5/11/20 - Since all the bookstores and libraries are closed for the time being, I'm having to reread the books I have lying around. Happy to report this mysterious little novel by Handke amply rewards a second reading.

***
An imaginary homecoming, filled with longing and strange tenderness; pursuit of the numinous in the interstices of the banal. Repetition is bound to strike a lot of people as kind of boring, and not without reason. Handke started his career by writing vanguard existential thrillers, but at some point shifted to a purified literature of contemplation. This book requires patience, but if you bear with it it may change the way you think...

Not what you think, but how you think. Content is almost nothing in this book. Slovenia is a real place. The narrator/protagonist really goes there and is transformed, and yet as I read I couldn't help suspecting that it might as well have been virtually anywhere else (to a foreigner, it could almost as easily have been St. Cloud, Minnesota or Walnut Creek, California); the protagonist does not form any relationships with the people of Slovenia. No, rather he finds it a perfect place to be alone; perfectly alone and yet also in communion with others, in a way that was never really possible in his actual empirical homeland of Austria. The mystical aura of the book has practically nothing to do with Slovenia itself.

I found this relevant to the controversy which has come to consume Handke's name. I tend to think it was his tenderness and longing for imagined homelands, much more than his early alienation and contrarianiness, that led him down the path of war crimes apologia. I don't think he was ever a Serbian supremacist, but just someone who had a highly idealized view of the former Yugoslavia. The prospect of its fragmentation filled him with horror, to the point that he saw preserving it as a just cause for war. Notoriously, this led him to make some genuinely vile statements.

Every reader should decide for him or herself whether this is a deal breaker. My personal feeling is that, for all his blindspots, Handke is also capable of illuminating obscure corners of human experience like very few other writers.

...
What if we're all just too decadent to appreciate Handke's genius?


http://thelastbooks.org/pdfs/sebald-a...

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

DIE WIEDERHOLUNG ist ein so poetisches, dicht verwobenes Vorhaben, dass mein Versuch, es in einigen Sätzen "abzuhandeln", nur zu kurz greifen und missraten kann.

Filip Kobal, so der Name des Protagonisten und Ich-Erzählers, reist als Heranwachsender nach der Schule ohne nennenswertes Gepäck alleine durch Slowenien, um dort zu sich und seinen Wurzeln zu finden. Wegbegleiter sind dem jungen Mann, der sich und vor allem der Welt fremd ist, ein Buch über Obstgärten, das sein verschollener Bruder einst geschrieben hat, und ein Lexikon der slowenischen Sprache.
Landschaft & Sprache, daran gewinnt Filip Orientierung und wird sich seiner selbst im Laufe der Reise zunehmend bewußt. Das Isonzotal, den Karst
" (...) erfahren als einen Ort, den ich, so lange wie möglich, immer wiedersehen will, um nicht zu vergessen, daß ich die Welt werden kann und mir selber wie dieser das auch schuldig bin" - so lautet der hohe Anspruch. Und in Bezug auf die Sprache:
"(D)er einzige wirksame Vorfahr, das weiß ich, ist der Satz, welcher dem, an dem ich gerade bin, vorausging."
Man darf wohl von einer Psychogeographie sprechen, der Suche des Dichters nach der ihm gemäßen Landschaft, mit der in einen intensiven Dialog tritt.

Ähnlich wie die Erinnerungen von Prousts Marcel zeichnen sich die von Handkes Filip Kobal (der in manchem biografische Gemeinsamkeiten mit seinem Autoren aufweist) dadurch aus, dass enorm genau hingesehen und die Sprache zu größtmöglicher Genauigkeit gezwungen wird.
Ein Höchstmaß an Sensibilität, in deren Zentrum allerdings immer nur der Erzähler steht, der Erzähler alleine. Und so sehr die Sprache auch beeindruckt, als Leser habe ich mich insbesondere im dritten und letzten Teil des Buches doch ein Stück weit außen vor gefühlt, als ungeladener Besucher, fast als Voyeur

DIE WIEDERHOLUNG soll die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in Kobal / Handke, aber sie ist sie nicht für das in mir.

[سپید · Rating 4 out of 5]

«مبادا محصول تلاش ما فقط سایه باشد.»
فلیپ کوبال ۴۵ ساله خاطرات چند روزی را که در سرزمین آبا و اجدادی‌ش گذرانده به یاد می‌آورد، سفری که شکلی از مکاشفه دارد، سفری که او را مقابل تمام روایت زندگی‌ش و باز-کشف آن قرار می‌دهد. او از مرگ مادرش روایت می‌کند، از اقتدار پدرش، از باغ سیب برادر مفقودش، از خواهر «نیمه‌خل»ش، از سال‌های مدرسه‌ی دینی و… روایت او داستان معمول زندگی‌ای است که به خاطر می‌آورد.

راوی از دیدگاهی شخصی‌ و شهودی‌ با مسئله زبان روبه‌رو می‌شود، چیزی که برای او اهیمت دارد احضار خاطراتش است، برای او کلمات خاصیت «جن‌وپری» یا جادویی دارند که با ادای آن‌ها می‌تواند آن‌چه را که از دست‌داده دوباره احضار کند. کنش‌محوری راوی «به خاطر آوردن» است، به خاطر آوردن زندگی‌ای که از سر گذرانده و با رجعت به ریشه‌ها اسلاونایی‌ش و برادر هرگز ندیده‌اش که هردو با آن لغت‌نامه‌ به شکل ابژه‌ی ازدست‌داده در هم‌تندیده‌اند، خیلی پیشتر از آنچه که خودش زندگی کرده. راوی در پی کشف است اما در این بین از خودش می‌پرسد که آیا آنچه که در درونش حس می‌کند و قابلیت به زبان آوردن را دارد؟
کنش یادآوری برای او منجی است که تجربه گذشته‌اش را «زنده» نگه می‌دارد. و کلمات وسیله‌ای‌ست که آن تجربیات از سرگذرانده را بازنمایی می‌کند و در «احضار خاموش» است که تمام خانواده‌ش را فرامی‌خواند.

[Gavin Armour · Rating 5 out of 5]

In einer ihrer ersten Reaktionen auf den ihr verliehenen Nobel-Preis für Literatur, sagte die Österreicherin Elfriede Jelinek, daß sie es ungerecht fände, weil nie im Leben bald erneut ein Österreicher den Preis bekäme und wenn, dann habe Peter Handke ihn verdient. Bedenkt man die qualitative Fülle der österreichischen Literatur, möchte man annehmen, daß auch die Akademie zu der Erkenntnis in der Lage sein wird, diesem kleinen aber feinen Land der Weltliteratur auch in kurzem Intervall den trotz allem immer noch wichtigsten Literaturpreis, den es weltweit zu vergeben gibt, zuzugedenken. Ansonsten nämlich müsste man Jelinek bei aller Bewunderung ihres literarischen Könnens unumwunden recht geben.

Die (verspätete) Lektüre der WIEDERHOLUNG, erschienen 1986, bestärkt diesen Eindruck einmal mehr. Mit der Kenntnis späterer Werke wie dem JAHR IN DER NIEMANDSBUCHT (1994), dem BILDVERLUST (2002) oder der MORAWISCHEN NACHT (2008) spürt man in diesem Text, wie sich der Autor wandelt. Kein Vergleich mehr zu früheren Texten, obwohl auch hier postuliert wird, das es die Erzählung sei, die alles überstrahle, die letztlich das Leben zurückhole: Die Erzählung ist hier längst gewichen: Einer Erkundung. Handke erkundet die Sprache als Weltmittler, ja Welt-Ermittler. Denn was, außer Sprache, lässt uns die Welt begreifen? Wollen wir aus der phänomenologischen Objektwelt in eine ontologisch erfassbare Referenz, wird uns nichts bleiben, außer den diversen Sprach-, Zeichen- und also Textsystemen.

Trotz etlicher Übereinstimmungen und Ähnlichkeiten, sollte man nicht den Fehler begehen, den uns als Erzähler ebenso egozentrisch wie seltsam transparent begegnenden Filip Kobal mit dem Autor Peter Handke gleichzusetzen. Denn das würde die Lektüre zugleich erschweren, suchte man doch immer nach der Biographie des Autors, und zu stark vereinfachen, würde es dem Leser doch in Momenten des Verdutzt-Seins, der literarischen Schwierigkeit zu schnell einen Ausweg bieten, sich auf Handkes eigenes Leben zu stützen und dort „Erklärung“ zu finden, wo es möglicherweise keine Erklärung im herkömmlichen Sinne gibt.

Filip Kobal erzählt uns davon, wie er zwanzig Jahre vor der Niederschrift seines Textes, nach dem Abitur, anstatt mit den Kameraden ins sonnige Griechenland zu reisen, einen Trip nach Slowenien unternommen hat, den im Krieg verschollenen Bruder wenn nicht zu finden, so doch, ihm nachzuspüren, ihn „wieder zu holen“. Ausgestattet mit einem Garten- und Landwirtschaftsbuch, in welchem der Ältere seine Kenntnisse dazu niedergeschrieben hat, macht sich Kobal also auf, bis hinunter in den Karst, jenes unwirtliche Land, das sich an die Triester Bucht anschließt und das ihm, Kobal, zu einem Spiegel der Seele, zu einer Urlandschaft, zum Ausgangspunkt wird, von dem her nicht nur „Land“ oder „Erde“, sondern auch „Ich“ oder „Bruder“ oder "Familie" oder "Heimat" gedacht werden können. Im Karst, so stellt Kobal am Ende seiner Reise/seines Textes fest, im Karst erst war es ihm möglich - entschlackt aller Sehnsüchte, frei von dem Wunsch zu verstehen, aufgehend im Wunsch zu schaffen, sich den Bruder als Erzählung neu zu erschreiben, sich ihm und ihn sich (neu) einzuschreiben – den tieferen Sinn oder vielleicht Un-Sinn seiner Unternehmung zu erfassen. Hier erst, am Ende seiner „Erzählung“, wird der Erzähler Handke wieder zu sich finden und, sollte DIE WIEDERHOLUNG wirklich die Summe seines bisherigen Werkes sein, wie Martin Lüdke es sieht, den (sprachlichen) Grund erkennen, von welchem aus er sich aufmachen konnte, sein späteres Werken und Wirken in Gang zu setzen.

In drei Teilen, vielleicht drei Erzählungen, kommt uns diese WIEDERHOLUNG entgegen. Zunächst macht er sich auf, der junge Mann und verliert sich umgehend in der Erzählung seiner Familie. Da sind Anklänge an Prousts berühmte „Madeleine“, wenn Kobal die Haut eines Milchkaffees fortträgt in Erinnerungen, die kaum die eigenen sein können. Die Fremde und die Ent-Fremdung einer Familie, die vor nicht allzu vielen Generationen aus dem Slowenischen ins Österreichische kam, dort zwar „Fuß fassen“ konnte, jedoch nie wirklich heimisch wurde, sind die herrschenden Themen, vermischt mit sehr persönlichen Stimmungen, Gefühlen und Ansichten. Kobal verliert sich.

Der zweite Teil, der Aufbruch und die ersten Eindrücke der „neuen“ Welt, die der junge Mann in der „alten Welt“ seiner Familie antrifft, bietet sich dem Leser als der gängigste, zugänglichste Teil der Erzählung, des Textes an. Doch hier auch wird uns Kobal zunächst unsympathisch, scheint doch alles Aneignung, sein ganzer Zugriff auf „Welt“ lediglich auf ihn bezogen, möglicherweise aus ihm kommend. Welt als „Ich“. Und die Ich-Werdung durch Welt in der Welt. Endloser Ego-Zentrismus, will dem Leser scheinen, alles wird zum direkten Bezug auf das Eigene: Menschen, Situationen, die Umgebung. Scheibar nichts und niemand steht für sich, alles bezieht sich auf Kobal. Und wir ahnen, daß Welterfahrung, Welterkenntnis, wohl letztlich nur so funktionieren kann, denn was könnte Welt erfahren, erkennen, erwirken - außer dem "Ich"?

Es sind die kleinen sprachlichen Stolpersteine, die Widerhaken, die diesen Seiten auch einen untergründigen Witz einschreiben. Da wird der Vater erzählt, wie er „keinmal“ auf den Stufen vor dem Haus saß oder auf einer Bank, die nicht daheim, sondern in einem entfernten Dorf steht. Dieses „Keinmal“ gefällt dem Autor (Kobal? Handke?) derart gut, daß es auf 17 Seiten viermal genutzt wird, um dann ca. 120 Seiten lang nicht mehr aufzutauchen und uns im dritten Teil - dem wohl unzugänglichsten dieses Buches und zugleich wesentlichen, was Handkes Schreiben angeht – plötzlich an unerklärlicher Stelle anzuspringen. Es ist die Sprache selbst, die hier zum Thema des Buches wird.

Es ist dies auch das "Eigentliche" dieses Werkes: Sein Erlebnis ist dieses Lesen, wie immer beim Autoren Handke. Wir werden gelockt und verführt durch die Schönheit, die Abenteurlichkeit der Grammatik, begeben uns auf halsbrecherische Kurse wortreicher Höhen, immer in Angst, der Autor könne stürzen und uns endlos mit sich reißen in einen Abgrund aus sprachlicher Wirrnis, und doch finden wir immer "sicheren Grund", auf dem uns Handke absetzt und doch nicht in Ruhe lässt, setzt er doch gleich an, uns auf den nächsten Kamm eines Wortgebirges zu führen. Handke lesen ist das eigentliche Abenteuer dieser Lektüre: Der Moment, in dem es geschieht, womit es dem Autor gelingt, die sprachliche, erkenntnistheoretische Aufschiebung, die Sprache in Schrift gegossen immer darstellt, momentweise aufzuheben. Wir müssen uns im Moment des Lesens vollkommen einlassen, sonst geht uns verloren, was Handke postuliert im Sein, das er zu erfassen sucht: Die Magie.

Es ist der dritte Teil dieses Werkes, der uns begreiflich werden lässt, wo der Autor schließlich steht.
Hier „weltet“ es nicht mehr durch Kobal, vielmehr geht Kobal auf in der Welt. Und wie tut er dies? In der Sprache, natürlich. Der dritte Teil der WIEDERHOLUNG lässt uns genau dies verstehen: Welt IST Sprache. Und der einzige Zugang, sich dieser Welt zu bemächtigen, ist die WIEDER-HOLUNG. Es bleibt uns nichts übrig, als zu begreifen, vielleicht mit dem französischen Sprachphilosophen Jacques Derrida gedacht, daß Welt und Sprache in einem immerwährenden Werden sich vollziehen, einem vorursprünglichen Ursprung verhaftet sind. Da mag es die Welt, die Geschichte, das Ich, die Emotionen oder Gedanken geben, doch wie sie einholen? Wie je deckungsgleich werden mit ihnen? Wie den seit zwanzig Jahren gegangenen Bruder ein- oder gar wiederholen? Außer in der Sprache? Und wo hat er je existiert? Außerhalb der Sprache?

DIE WIEDERHOLUNG ist eines der Werke, die Peter Handke eben jene Preise zugestehen müssten, die er nicht erhalten wird. Es ist dies ein Sich-Ehrlichmachen, das Sich-Ehrlichmachen eines Wortarbeiters. Selten konnte man am praktischen Beispiel das Theoretische derart einfangen, erkennen und abpassen, es sozusagen auf seine Tauglichkeit prüfen, wie in diesem Text. Ein schwieriger Text, ein Text, der die Re-Lektüre wahrscheinlich wieder und wieder er- und einfordert, ein Text, der heute leider wie aus der Zeit gefallen wirkt. Und deshalb wahrscheinlich so zeitgemäß ist wie nichts sonst, das dieser Tage geschrieben und veröffentlicht wird.

[Bartleby · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those rare books which in each page is a gem.

[Daniele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mi trovo in grande difficoltà a recensire questa opera, tanto profonda quanto complessa per lo stile ed il linguaggio.
Ho apprezzato i temi trattati, la ricerca del fratello scomparso e delle proprie origini e il ritrovare contestualmente se stessi, ma ho fatto una sudata pazzesca per state dietro alla scrittura di Handke che mi ha impegnato parecchio e anche un po' annoiato.
Sicuramente non è un lettura estiva, sarebbe da rileggere in un periodo meno concitato dell'anno per dedicargli il giusto riguardo,ma per il momento la lascio lì :)

Una volta eravamo seduti in diversi attorno a un tavolo a parlare . All'inizio partecipavo , ma poi , tutt'a un tratto , era finita tra me e gli altri , quella compagnia là e io qua . Ormai li sentivo solo parlare , senza vederli ; tutt'al più si alzava di scatto o si spostava qualche arto , nella coda dell'occhio . In cambio l'udito era tanto più acuto : tenore e tono di ogni singola frase sarei stato in grado di riprodurli subito così chiaramente da far spavento , più naturali che il migliore dei registratori .

Poi , però , pensai che tutto ciò dipendeva dal fatto che casa nostra , a vent'anni dalla scomparsa di mio fratello , era ancora una casa in lutto ; che il disperso , a differenza di uno dato morto per certo , non lasciava requie ai congiunti , ma continuava per loro , senza che potessero far proprio niente , a morire ogni giorno .

Se allora riuscii con qualche passo a trovarmi fuori all'aperto , ora sono costretto a restare nel tunnel , dove per me non si presenta più nessun riparo , nessuna nicchia , nessun parapetto , e la mia sola via verso un'umanità è di applicare gli occhi di una parola , in grado di graziarmi , alle cose del pianeta muto di cui io , volendo essere il narratore - colpa mia ! - , sono il prigioniero .

Finalmente io , che per tutta la vita avevo mirato all'autonomia , mi rivelavo bisognoso d'aiuto qual ero , e finalmente quell'essere umano , che in segreto s'era spesso infuriato perché nessuno lo soccorreva , poteva lasciarsi aiutare senza opporre resistenza - una sorta di liberazione , di redenzione .

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book probably deserves more than three stars. The language is beautiful, and there are so many great sentences and descriptions. I had no idea what was going on though, I think it might be ignorance on my part about Austria and Slovenia, so much of the book was connected with the physical locations and place and their relationship between places and homelessness from one place that I had to make up in my head what I thought was being said, but my made up ideas didn't carry the weight Handke intended. The novel itself seemed out of place, there was something very 'modern' about it, taking place in the 1960's but the entire book also felt like it came from an earlier time, and that people don't necessarily write books like this anymore. What do I mean? I don't know, there was something about the book that straddled (ohhhhh, I see a link in the book now) over the two world wars with one foot on the literature of the of an earlier time and one in the 1960's. Reading the book was a very pleasant experience, and now that I'm thinking harder about the book as a whole I'm starting to appreciate it even more. I wouldn't recommend it to most people though, it's a bit too much of what gets called a 'writers book', which usually means a book where not much happens but which is written in an interesting and technically beautiful way.

[Emil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kul att läsa Svår Litteratur. Man får ta om vissa stycken när man läser för fort. Andra gången blir det antingen tydligt eller så förblir det dunkelt, och då är det bara att gå vidare. För man får nya chanser, Handkes metod är upprepning, och ur denna framkommer hans ärende så småningom: Det finns ingen mening, ingen ideologi. Språket och berättelsen är allt. Utsattheten kan aldrig övervinnas, bara beskrivas, men därigenom också avklädas.

Handke skriver tät, slingring och för det mesta rätt svårgenomtränglig prosa. Det finns långa avsnitt då jag känner mig helt bortkollrad. Det gör i och för sig att de stycken som man tar till sig blir väldigt starka – ja, han har ju koll på det här med att skriva – men det blir ändå en något förlorad läsupplevelse när så mycket flyger över huvet på en.
Ska läsa om den nån gång; kanske får det låga betyget då en välförtjänt omprövning.

[Pat Stokes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really dense, and is certainly more taxing than much I have read recently but without being boring or overbearing, very much the opposite, and it is just over 200 pages long. It follows a young man’s journey across the border between Austria and Slovenia in the year 1960 (Though this is a book that has absolutely nothing to say at all about the Soviet Union - to be clear.)
I found it in total to be a really special book, one that is beautiful and interesting and quite
humourless - quite Germanic book - and also is occasionally very moving. It is tough to sum up in its entirety and is well worth reading.

[Julie J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Das erste Handke-Buch, das ich halbwegs mochte.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

if i were still in grad school maybe i would write something longform on Handke's metaphysical politics and his metaphorical Central Europe (a concept which I believe, and I am not alone, has led to some of Handke's more bizarre reactionary politics). I am not in grad school though so instead I will just say that i almost always love the artful way that Handke can illuminate how light filters through a canopy of leaves or how rock structures have stratified over time. Weird guy whose style seems somehow both concise and aloof, even when he's not really working for me i find something of interest.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

here's how handke describes the leavetaking from his father of a young man about to go off on a long tramp for the summer:
"With sagging knees, dangling arms, and gout-gnarled fingers, which at that moment impersonated furious clenched fists, the frail, aging man, much smaller than I, stood by the wayside Cross and shouted at me: 'All right, go to the dogs like your brother, like our whole family! None of us has ever amounted to anything, and you won't either. You won't even get to be a good gambler like me.' Yet, just then, he had embraced me for the first time in my life."

easily categorized as a bildungsroman--but what is formed is various: a young man on a long searching summer, a family mutilated by war, or even a whole continent--europe--which exists as a flux of languages and landscapes and only intermittently succeeds in being a unified concept.

handke's REPETITION is murky--and great. the language, while beautiful and careful, attempts deep or multiple refractions--symbols or resonances that are extended and embroidered and almost lost metaphors.

it's strange and almost tediously complex to describe this book's instinctive method. handke, for example, writes a long and devastating description of his brother's orchard, before and after ruin--and you are swept away by, included in, the care and detail of an orchard farmer's plans as well as the following relentless organic destruction of them, all the while aware of some underlying and alluded-to familial and national heartbreak.

the middle section's entire plot is not unfairly summarized thus: a guy reads a foreign language dictionary. and handke makes this story, no joke, mesmerizing.

in an admittedly reductive and probably dumb way i began thinking, while reading this, that handke is the bridge between bernhard and sebald. that the monolithic and misanthropic monologue of bernhard, which eventually becomes the sad and careful and even sweet obsession with the lost swirls of history that is sebald, has to go through the step of handke--a rich but darkly-glassed casting about for comprehension of fundamentals like existence and identity.

pretty rad book.

_________________

[learned here that REPETITION is a re-do of Handke’s first novel THE HORNETS (Die Horniseen, 1966), which is a text Handke’s stated he “wanted to re-write some day.”]

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

»Erzählung, wiederhole, das heißt, erneuere; immer neu hinausschiebend eine Entscheidung, welche nicht sein darf.« (S. 333)

Peter Handkes Roman als Reise durch Slowenien als die Suche eines Verschollenen und Begegnung mit Verlust, mit dem Tod. Die Wiederholung enthält die Beobachtungen der Hauptfigur Filip Kobal, der die Natur, der Auswirkungen der Geschichte des Landes, die Natur der eigenen Familie, als sprachlich gewandte, bildhafte Erzählung wiedergibt.

Kein Sich-Wiederholen, vielmehr ein »Sich-Wieder-Holen«, meint der Surkamp Verlag.

Handkes Erzählung schildert lebhaft mehrdimensional die Landschaft Sloweniens, welche mir aus den Urlaubsreisen meiner Kindheit mit meiner Familie keineswegs ein fremdes war.

In den wortbeflissenen, fließenden Schilderungen fängt der Autor diese Landschaft in einer Weise so gelungen ein, dass auch mir während der Lektüre ein »Sich-Wieder-Holen« möglich gemacht wurde.

»Es lebe die Erzählung. Die Erzählung muss weitergehen.« (S. 333)

[David Loza · Rating 3 out of 5]

No sabía qué pensar antes de leerlo. Nunca había oído hablar de La repetición ni de Peter Handke. No fue para nada lo que esperaba y aún me cuesta un poco definirlo. Es un libro que resalta dentro de mi trayectoria lectora pero a la vez pasa desapercibido como uno más del montón. Nunca antes me había costado tanto terminar un libro que disfrutase. La manera de narrar de Peter es muy peculiar, describiendo detalladamente algunas de las cosas más simples dándoles un profundo significado, y en lugar de frustrarme logró interesarme. Se puede decir que nos la pasamos dentro de la cabeza del protagonista Philip Kobal hasta tal punto que a veces, pasar las páginas de La repetición se convierte en una experiencia casi onírica. En lo referente a los personajes, debo decir que me identifiqué con un par de aspectos con el personajes principal, pero los demás me dieron igual. Si no fuera por la narración tan peculiar creo que el libro habría pasado sin mucha relevancia en mi vida.

[steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A luminous novel that takes our displacement among signs and language as its origin.

[João Álvares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Handke is a more human Proust. This book is like listening to Mr. Handke telling his story. Beautiful.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

'To breathe deeply was to yearn was to tense the strongest muscle.'

[Richard Cho · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave four starts to this novel, but I've never felt that rating a book can be this meaningless. For me, this book will have received either six stars or four stars, but the setting is done so that I can't give a six-star rating, so I gave four. I know this doesn't make any sense, but this is what I think.

Also, this novel may be the most difficult novel that I've ever read. Saying that there is no storyline seems too simplistic. Handke's way of narration is entirely new and resists any comparison. Instead of any action, everything prose seems to be composed of description.

"What I have written thus far about my father's house, about the village of Rinkenberg and the Jaunfeld Plain, must have been clearly present to my mind a quarter of a century ago in the Jesenice station, but I couldn't have told it to anyone. What I felt within me were mere impulses without sound, rhythms without tone, short and long rises and falls without the corresponding syllables, a mighty reverberation of periods without the requisite words, the slow, sweeping, stirring, steady flow of a poetic meter without lines to go with it, a general surge that found no beginning, jolts in the void, a confused epic without a name, without the innermost voice, without the coherence of script. What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurred but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered, I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly, I look on memory as more than a haphazard thinking back--as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention."

"Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud."


From Sebald's Essay on the novel:

...the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior."

What unsettled critics more than anything else was Handke's new and, one could say, programmatic design for the visualization of a more beautiful world by virtue of language alone.

In every case, the metaphysic developed in Handke's newer books, which aims to translate the seen and perceived into language, remains undiscussed. ... And yet art, wherever and whenever it may take place, bears the closest ties to the realm of metaphysics.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A generally plotless, reflective novel about a young Austrian man of mixed German and Slovenian descent, who travels to communist Yugoslavia on the trail of his brother Gregor. The novel is about the protagonist’s search for identity. There is little backstory or character development. A beautifully written, fairly dry novel.

The author explores heritage, our place in the world, family and memory.

Quotes from the book:
‘With sagging knees, dangling arms, and gout, gnarled fingers, which at that moment impersonated furious clenched fist, the frail, aging man, much smaller than I, stood by the wayside Cross and shouted at me. “All right, go to the dogs like your brother, like our whole family! None of us has ever amounted to anything, and you won’t either. You won’t even get to be a good gambler like me.” Yet, just then, he had embraced me for the first time in my life.”

‘What I had experienced at the age of twenty was not yet a memory. And memory meant not that what-had-been recurring, but that what-had-been situated itself by recurring. If I remembered. I knew that an experience was thus and so, exactly thus; in being remembered, it first became known to me, nameable, voiced, speakable; accordingly I look on memory as more than haphazard thinking back - as work; the work of memory situates experience in a sequence that keeps it alive, a story which can open out into free storytelling, greater life, invention.’

This book was first published in 1986.

[Hana · Rating 3 out of 5]

quaint musing on the subtle beauty as well as potency of both language and nature

[Živa · Rating 4 out of 5]

najlepsi slog pisanja kar sem jih kdaj brala