Home—the need to get away from it; the need to find a way back to it; the need to make a new one—is the deep and abiding theme of Handke’s mature work, which is steeped in the poetry of places
near and far, and is full of questions of love and family. Slow Homecoming is a musical work in three movements in which Handke, putting aside the nerve-wracked style of his early work
for a new simplicity, meditates on exile, art, and the nature of the bonds between parent and child.
The first part of the book, “The Long Way Around,” revisits America, as Valentin Sorger, a geologist who has been living and working in Alaska, travels cross-county to New York on his way back
to Europe. Sorger has gone to the end of the world to get the message that he must go back where he came from. The second part, “The Lesson of Mont St.-Victoire,” describes another pilgrimage,
to the mountain in Provence that Cézanne painted again and again, and shows Handke to be one of the outstanding nature writers of our time. Finally, “Child Story” is a tender, mesmerizing,
scrupulously honest account of a new father—it could be Sorger, the author, or any man with a young child—and his struggle to raise and understand his daughter.
