Slow Homecoming

<p><b>By Nobel Prize Winner Peter Handke</b></p><p>Provocative romantic and restlessly exploratory Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. <i>Slow Homecoming</i> 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 <i>Slow Homecoming</i> 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.</p><p>&#160;</p><p>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 &#147;The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire&#148; 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 C&#233;zanne painted again and again. Finally &#147;Child Story&#148; is a beautifully observed deeply moving account of a new father&#151;not so much Sorger or the author as a kind of Everyman&#151;and his love for his growing daughter.</p>