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Once Again for Thucydides

peter handke tess lewis

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Once Again for Thucydides  is a collection of seventeen “micro-epics” written by Peter Handke on trips around the world, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, from Salzburg to the sea of Hokkaido in Japan. In each journal, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their “simple, unadorned validity.” What results is a work of remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of random objects––an ash tree, a shoeshine man, hats in a crowd, a boat loading on a pier––and discovers their inner workings and mystery. Always, his writing hints at the unknown. Describing the snow melting in a garden or falling during a train ride through inland Japan, the glowworms illuminating the plains in Friuli, the tidal waters flowing and receding off the Atlantic coast of Spain, these amazing little “epics” reveal a narrator obsessed with the wonders of detail and marveling, as are we, at the scope and variety of the natural world.

90 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1990

This edition

Format
90 pages, Hardcover
Published
September 17, 1998 by New Directions
ISBN
9780811213882
ASIN
0811213889
Language
English

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About the author

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peter handke

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 21 votes)
5 stars
8(38%)
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21 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Hak_Fanboy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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It seems all loners think the same when they roam on their travels around the globe... I remembered some things that happened to me when I was on my journeys, sometimes the book is too existencialist but it do u turns in the right moments.
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kickmesign
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Handke cares about language, or rather the inability of language to ultimately express the inexpressible. The overwhelming, painstaking attention to detail, as through the most minute motion a fluid, camera makes reading Handke at times denset, but always rewarding.

The flashe of illumination comes from the sheer vertigo of his endless wandering, that's where this, arguably, travel book gets its punch; at times even establishes the contact between the object-observer-writer and the 'places' its neutral camera like objectivity 'analyzes' (...)

I once was considered a detached and cold writer way early in some other universe, so I can relate.
*

From the earlier notes...

His minute attention to detail, say a graffiti on the wall in Macedonia, or an overgrown weed patch in Dalmatia (natives generally too languid to bother) could only get you that far..

This valiant travel book does not have to (be) read in order. One can skip back and forth, travel with the author to these often less traveled, geographically more cryptic locales.

Good book, perhaps even great if read in the original German tongue (which sadly I cannot).
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FancyPants0
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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I finished this book over two days sitting in my parents living room in Palm Springs.

Later, years later, when I write this review, I recall sitting in the chair. I remember dad drinking eggnog. I remember my mom’s favorite radio stations. She’s in the kitchen. She’s making cookies. In four years, when I write this review, I’ll remember him and her on a train from Salerno to Rome.
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GumGumSaiyan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Aparentemente se trata de un libro de viajes, 17 cuadros que describen otros tantos momentos vividos en la antigua Yugoslavia, España o el norte de Italia. Pero realmente estas descripciones no son impresiones del viajero sino del observador, del escritor abierto a la epifanía de la caída de la nieve o el vuelo de las golondrinas y los murciélagos a cierta hora del atardecer. La trascendencia del instante aparentemente tranquilo, anodino, es la del xonfscfi con la naturaleza, con los desconocidos o con el pasado, pero sobre todo es lograda gracias a una capacidad descriptiva virtuosa.
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serge512
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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While the concept and theme of this book is something that's right up my alley, it seems like Handke is trying to imitate great German and Austrian writers. The problem? His enumerations and tiny digressions tend to lose focus and disrupt the flow, which seems like an act of complacency. I don't like complacency.
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Omkarop_06
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Brief descriptions of things that happen, in nature on certain moments, just related like snapshots, presented with little comment. I get almost nothing out of writing like this.
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yaboiTheOtaku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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If these stories were photographs they would be shot in macro.

If they were paintings they would probably go under impressionism.

What an amazing world this writer possesses inside!
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UCDETC
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Best when these "micro-epics" (the argot dreamed-up by the dust jacket's p.r.) turned to the self-conscious, when Hankde's personality broke in, melancholic (e.g. when narrator tries to arrests his natural inclination to match the pattern of an ash tree's trunk bark to that of flagstones in Cividale del Friuli: "Hadn't I always felt alienated or even repulsed when other writers used their sense of imagery in this way...parading their mystical gift for an omnipresence that could always transform a modern ruin into an ancient temple or change the calyx of a lily into an oriental king's tent out of whose depths the appropriate shawm music immediately resounds?"), otherwise a mild, pleasurable break to reside with Handke's eyes (circa 1987-90) for a spell.
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