Review by Booklist Review
The latest from Nobel laureate Handke tells the story of a homecoming to a place no longer homey. What was once a region of small villages is now an "agglomeration," a collection of suburbs. The place is not named and may as well be nameless. Gregor--from the Greek for "watchful" and echoing Kafka's Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis--returns to spend a week with his family and become his nephew's godfather. But news from abroad deflects his trajectory. He wanders around, sleeps rough, and muses on Odysseus and the recognition scene of his return from his wanderings. And while Gregor is recognized as a local eccentric, he cannot settle: "Every time during those seven days when I thought I'd seen enough, the seeing refused to stop." This novel in three parts is an account of this restless looking and distractions from looking. The final section, the shortest, is an extraordinary lyric, the observations becoming sensations as they are expressed, the order appearing random yet likely to be the result of decades of refinement until the incidental feels inevitable and touching.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gregor Werfer, the one-eyed protagonist of this perceptive if ponderous outing from Nobel winner Handke (The Second Sword), reflects on mortality and the passage of time during a visit to his childhood home. Urban sprawl has taken over the formerly rural setting in an unspecified country, and a neighbor's house is now "barely an arm's length" from Gregor's family's courtyard. To avoid spoiling his visit, he withholds from his parents and younger sister the devastating news that his younger brother, Hans, has been killed in battle. Handke doesn't explain why the others don't get the news, and Gregor soon avoids them, spending the night in a nearby forest and in several taverns while reflecting on his relationship with Hans, what kind of godfather he will be to his sister's out-of-wedlock infant, the benefits of being the last guest in a restaurant, and the local townspeople ("They had sorrow, unmitigated sorrow, they were in mourning for something or other; they had a disability, whether visible or not, were haunted--day in, day out--by fear of death"). The result is a dense and thorough exploration of one man's grappling with change and loss ("Do I live on what reveals itself only in retrospect?"). It's enlightening and exasperating in equal measure. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Austrian novelist returns with a characteristically enigmatic story. Gregor Werfer--we learn his first name a couple of dozen pages in, his last only near the end of Handke's latest--is a cipher who has been "living and working for ages--his own--on another continent, or, as he called it, 'part of the world.'" Just what he does there is something of a mystery, but there are plenty of clues that link him to the literary wanderer of old, Odysseus, "who from a young age had been obsessed with the unknown, the foreign, especially with experiences he could have all by himself, on his own." Rather than fend off Circe or battle Polyphemus, however, Gregor has a more mundane task to perform: He's returned to his family farm, a once-quiet place now being swallowed up by an encroaching city, the nearby chapel "surrounded by office towers, some of which grazed the sky." There Gregor is supposed to take on the role of godfather at his infant nephew's baptism, but beforehand he has to wrestle with the odd dynamics of his kin--and with the terrible news that his much younger brother has been killed while serving in the French Foreign Legion. Given that "it was an unspoken rule in the family, going back generations, that no questions were to be asked," Gregor is in no hurry to get home and finds plenty of reason to hang out in local bars and hotels, albeit with a kind of Meursaultian indifference to his surroundings and fellow humans. Handke moves slowly, deliberately through the proceedings, occasionally taking potshots at the "couch potatoes, nook- and-cranny crouchers, shithouse stowaways, idiot-box starers," and other manifestations of modern life. It's not his most memorable work, but it's still of some interest to the neoexistentialists in the audience. Nothing much happens in these pages, though Handke fans will admire the moody atmospherics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
