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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Poëtische woorden, dwalend, ik ga het boek nog eens lezen, na het opzoeken van Engelse woorden die ik niet ken en begrippen, feestdagen, spreekwoorden, plaatsen die genoemd worden. Het boek eindigt met 6 witte bladzijdes, ruimte, het boek heeft veel ruimte, het heeft tijd nodig, mogelijk om op te vullen met aantekeningen. Nog open, ik laat het open, het eindigt onaf, als een aantekening, opengelaten.

Thanks to Riley for reminding me that I've owned this book for awhile and haven't cracked it, though "cracked" isn't the the right word for a Peter Handke book. In an "epic" about an enormous ash tree in Munich, here are some key lines: "I did see a larger world again within the small one, but to do so, I was more than just looking. The larger world did not arise as effortlessly as it had the day before. Because I was approaching the tree for a second time, even if my gaze was not deliberate, I was perhaps too set on continuing and expanding the phenomenon of the tree . . ." Hypnotic, meditative, dare I say "Zen-like" descriptions of a thunderstorm, unloading cargo from ships, falling "Japanese" snow, and my favorite, all the various hats passing on heads in Skopje, Macedonia, on December 10, 1987. At best, Handke makes you aware of infinite everyday epics invisible all around you. At worst, this sort of stuff can sometimes be super-soporific. Three stars really for a semi-distracted first read, but another given since small nightly doses of close wintertime re-reading, one epic pre-sleep, could easily reveal a fifth star.

Sometimes when I ride my bike in the grass, on the road or on the sidewalk, I wonder how many ants and other tiny life forms I'm killing and maiming, and it disturbs me. I think I'm being green and earth-friendly by this mode of transportation, yet I am probably responsible for genocide on a massive scale in the micro universe.

Reading Peter Handke's "mini epics" in Once Again for Thucydides put me to mind of this personal observation because the 17 short pieces in this book attempt to isolate, coolly observe and describe rituals and everyday phenomena of the human and wider natural order that are typically ignored or unobserved by otherwise distracted humans.

Handke essentially attempts to turn pictures into a thousand words as he contemplates the ostensibly ordinary on travels mostly through Europe and Asia in the late 1980s: the loading of a cargo ship in Dubrovnik, formations of pigeons and the artistic flourishes of a shoeshine man in Croatia, distant thunderstorms on a Yugoslav isle, the falling of snow on Hokkaido in Japan, a Greek man's futility in trying to capture his escaped parakeet, an inexplicable procession of citizens in a Macedonian town, a Catholic oil ceremony in Spain, a luminous night of glowworms in Italy, a thawing stream in the Pyrenees, the movement of cloud formations around a mountain near Salzburg, impressions about a beloved ash tree in the center of Munich, the barren aftermath of a French forest fire, etc.

The universality of the things observed make the actual locales themselves somewhat anonymous. These are mostly things that could take place anywhere. It turns the idea of travel diary on its head a bit.

I had mixed feelings reading this collection. An essential question that nagged me was whether Handke, by taking a microscope to typically ignored actions and things (such as the loading of a cargo ship), succeeds in making these things any more interesting or any less boring. Another basic question I pondered was: Just because someone writes something and writes it well, does that mean it's a worthwhile endeavor to read it?

These concerns arose partly because I couldn't decide if Handke's observations were clinical, poetic, or philosophical. I hardly detected much attempt by Handke to overlay much philosophic meat on the scenes he described, and yet, there is a certain wisdom and interpretive POV inherent in the way he describes things.

I wondered what the tie exactly is supposed to be to the historian Thucydides. If Thucydides' histories were like Peter Handke's diarist essays we might know a lot about how people milked their cows in ancient Greece but not a whole hell of a lot about the Peloponnesian War.

Needless to say, the glum Austrian Mr. Handke is not a laugh riot, and what philosophic pondering there is to be done is mostly left to the reader.

There are themes to be gleaned from all of this; about how one travels life's path, for instance, and about how the markings of those paths are as impermanent as we are.

If there is any tie to Thucydides at all, it might be the fact that little has really changed about the basic human condition since the days of the Greek historian. People go about their jobs and travels, and nature's cycles continue as always. All of this might be interesting to read about and contemplate if not for the fact that it has all been written about and contemplated in far more compelling and thought-provoking fashion by scads of other writers. There's nothing new to the mix here to make this book memorable.

The text could have added value as a teaching tool for showing students how to pen basic, minimalist descriptive word pictures.

There were a few times while reading this that I was put to mind of Chris Marker's masterful 1983 essay art film, Sans Soleil, especially in the way Handke used image memories from previously visited places to comment on observations of the place being visited in the here and now.

Reading this, I wasn't requiring or expecting a narrative skeleton for these observations, but I think I would have liked a little more philosophical meat. As it stands, it's a sparse diary, an exercise, more academic than heartfelt. Maybe this is the way Handke always is. More readings will tell. This is my first encounter with him, and, I suspect, possibly not the best place to start.

If there are deeper meanings in these "stories"--for lack of a better word--I'm missing them, clearly.

Maybe next time Handke could write observations about things seen, or unseen, while riding a bike. But he can't have my first paragraph. That's mine.

This collection of short pieces is rather uneven. I like the premise: a series of very short pieces that each strives to capture some detail he observed in his travels to various places and by examining that detail, to explore some aspect of the significance of the place. All are worth reading. A few puzzled me. One seemed a little overdrawn.

And one, "Attempt to Exorcise One Story with Another", is one of the most powerful short pieces of writing I have ever read. If you read nothing else from this book, the book is worth picking up just for that.