3.5
Repetition
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesRepetition Reviews
3.5
Ebirr23
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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Ashwin Glittus
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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“Gregor Kobal was a soldier. He is missing from an unspecified time. His brother Filib one day sets out on a meandering journey to find Gregor. Gregor used to write him letters. Initially, those letters used to be about his personal experiences in the army. But, gradually, those letters started taking on a cerebral hue. From musings on philosophy to the genesis of language, the scale of his writing expands but the scope stays intimate.
Divided into three parts, REPETITION by Peter Handke, often regarded as his most influential novel (W.G Sebald called it as "the" novel that influenced his writing the most), starts on a note that feels like uncharted territory. For a Handke novel, this initial stretch is surprisingly specific. There is a name to the setting, there are names to the characters that populate said setting and the most profound departure from Handke's previous work is that there is history to said setting.
The second part is where the book becomes a quintessential Peter Handke novel. Charting Filib's journey from Carinthia to Slovenia in search of Gregor, none of the pit stops on the way have a name to them. The arrangement of event follows, true to character for Handke, a waking-dream chronology wherein Filib in one sentence is inside a vehicle but even before the next sentence begins, he is already walking again. There is intentionally no narrative connective tissue between him being in the vehicle and him starting to walk again. "It reads like a dream" is something Handke takes rather literally.
The existential phenomena Handke trains his lens on this time is.... language. Or rather, a geographical trek through the history of language. Every region Filib reaches, he reaches out to a book his cousin has left behind. That book is a Slovenian - German dictionary. The clue about his current setting is given through the words he is curious about. That in turn leads to a tracking down of the linguistic history and roots of the land. And that leads to my only gripe about the novel. In his symbolic allusions, Handke is a bit too verbose than usual. While talking about the linguistic roots of his current setting, Handke then goes on to talk about the vein-like nature of roots by drawing a parallel between the veins in a human body and the veins in the roots of a tree. While the contemplation about humans being nomadic trees is interesting, the overall discourse surrounding roots in the novel feels a bit like an exercise in spoon feeding.
Overall, while I loved reading REPETITION, I honestly prefer Handke's vague prose over his specific prose.”
Northwestbookish
Created almost 5 years agoShare
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Simon Freeman
Created over 5 years agoShare
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“"Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time that I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasise something?... Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare mot juste that made me feel that I had a soul? "”
About Peter Handke
was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as
,
,
, and
. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels
and
, and co-wrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders'
and
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.
Other books by Peter Handke
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