A review by blairmahoney
Repetition by Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim

4.0

Very impressive in many ways, but I found this very hard going at times from the controversial winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. It's more opaque than his earlier The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which is the only other book I've read of his, and there's an almost Murnanian exploration of the narrator's past and the Slovenian landscape he has travelled to. He's following in the footsteps of an older brother he never really knew (one aspect of the repetition) and trying to make sense of his life through a Slovenian dictionary. It's dreamlike and mysterious.