Repetition

by Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim (Translator)

Overview

Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's Repetition tells of Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregor.

He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian - German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

"Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by [Repetition]." - Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250767271
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. His many novels include The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, and Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, all published by FSG. Handke’s dramatic works include Kaspar and the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Handke is the recipient of many major literary awards, including the Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann Prizes and the International Ibsen Award. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Ralph Manheim (b. New York, 1907) was an American translator of German and French literature. His translating career began with a translation of Mein Kempf in which Manheim set out to reproduce Hitler's idiosyncratic, often grammatically aberrant style. In collaboration with John Willett, Manheim translated the works of Bertolt Brecht. The Pen/Ralph Manheim Medal for translation, inaugurated in his name, is a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation. He himself won its predecessor, the PEN translation prize, in 1964. Manheim died in Cambridge in 1992. He was 85.

Editorial Reviews

"Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by [Repetition]." - Publishers Weekly

"The book spans the early years through his teens and is told in a manner backgrounded throughout by a definite yet modest poetic glow, a glow akin to that we might ordinarily associate with folk and fairy tales." - Drunken Boat

From the Publisher

More ambitious than much of his work, ''Repetition,'' is a full-length novel, recognizable as search for the true self. The intention is to shatter Austrian complacency, utterly to reject the national conspiracy of silence and evasion, so that the Austrian at last can be his own man. Admirable as this would be, Mr. Handke is not the writer for it. To some extent, the alienation of this novel is attributable to the deliberate distancing of its style. More crucially, ''Repetition'' reveals one man set so implacably against his fellows that he can do nothing but pity himself and hate them. Surrender to these reactions serves to extend the Nazi legacy rather than to destroy it. New beginnings without humanity are not new beginnings at all. . . . It is this novel's melancholy achievement to show such sentiment for what it is, not cleansing but deepening the moral confusion of the world the Nazis left to their descendants. -- New York Times

David Pryce-Jones

Handke's eminence, displayed in a substantial oeuvre of plays, novels and poems, is reaffirmed brilliantly by his latest work. In 1960, Filip Kobal, an alienated, 20-year-old, nascent Austrian writer of Slovenian descent, embarks on a quest to the land of his forebears. Ostensibly a retracing of his much older brother's last steps 20 years before (he was a Slovenian patriot, lover and revivifier of the language and tradition, and a doomed member of the Resistance), the journey is in fact an odyssey of self-discovery for Filip the man and the writer. Handke fashions an extraordinary retelling of the archetypal journey of initiation where the hero must travel beyond the frontiers of the known in order to transform himself into a higher state of being. Using his brother's agricultural student copybook and Slovenian-German dictionary as guides, Filip discovers language's magical ability to expand and transform reality. He attains a transcendent vision in which things and their names are all conjoined and enfolded upon themselves. And with undercurrents of memory of a bloody, oppressive past and consciousness of a sickly political present manifested in its debased, prosaic use of words, Handke reminds us, in crystalline prose, that our speech, our freedom and spiritual wholeness are one. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

$18.95. f Growing through time and passing through space engross young Austrian Filip Kobal. Setting out from Austria in summer 1960, Filip crosses into Yugoslavia, following the path of his dead brother, Gregor. As companions he takes two books: his brother's old notebook and a Slovenian-German dictionary. Through the notebook he regains contact with Gregor by recapturing events from his truncated life. The dictionary explodes language into a palpable present and points Filip toward his true calling as a writer. This novel is not among Handke's best. Composed of ``word sequences,'' it is intended ``to be both consistent and imaginative,'' but while the latter is true, the former, woefully, is not. Amidst the swirling phrases one is apt to ask, ``Just what is the point?'' The answer, like this novel, is not satisfying. Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

Library Journal