BOOKS
PETER HANDKE
SLOW HOMECOMING.
By
Peter Handke.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$16.95.
One always expects the unexpected from Austrian writer
Peter Handke . In his previous novels , as well as in poetry and plays,
he has displayed a versatile talent for rupturing conventional idioms
to open a new aesthetic pulse . Yet Handke never shuffles traditional
forms merely to pull off a nihilistic joke; his ouevre is not driven by a
camp-like cynicism that views the surface as everything (and thus,
ultimately, nothing). Instead he has set about portraying something
quite the opposite. Influenced by the later Wittgenstein, Handke has
focused on the implausible task of rendering "what cannot be spoken
or' - the realm of meaning that eludes the language of fact. In his
earlier novels-A
Moment of True Feeling, Short Letter, Long Farewell,
The Left-Handed Woman,
and
The Weight of the World-
he achieved
this, in part, by microscopically recording the banal texture of daily
reality and then opening this out so that what had escaped descrip–
tion hovered like an aura, silently, at the forefront.
In
Slow Homecoming,
he employs this technique to explore what
is arguably the most awkward and poignant - and least spoken of–
predicament of our disoriented period: namely, how can one salvage
a self in an age that has lost coherent meaning? Echoing the ancient
story of Odysseus's journey, Handke sets his no-self protagonist,
Sorger (the name means "worry" and "anxiety") off in a faraway land,
Alaska, and slowly brings him home to Europe and to himself. In
the northern wilderness, Sorger, a geologist, cohabits a cabin with a
colleague named Lauffer. But this "student of slopes," as Sorger calls
him, turns out to be a chronic liar. Since Lauffer's name means "the
messenger," one can deduce that Handke is aiming for more here
than an intriguing portrait of a guileful character. Moreover, Lauffer
doesn't lie out of spite , but because he is kind and wants other people
to feel appreciated even though their company makes him "miserable."
Through this allusive device, Handke is able to set up the crux of the
dilemma that spurs the rest of the action of the novel : Sorger's grop–
ing efforts to orient himself with reality when "the messengers" of the
outer world, that is , the facts , are deceptive . They offer a way of or-
