SOURCE: “A Magic Touch,” in New Statesman & Society, August 5, 1988, p. 38.

In the following review, Oldfield offers a positive assessment of Repetition.

In Peter Handke's new novel, his young narrator describes a painter retouching an unseen mural inside a wayside shrine. He resolves to write “so silently … without ulterior motive of any kind. Whatever this future work might be, it would have to be comparable to this painting, which ennobled the painter and with him the chance witness”. This sanctified, secluded site of creation is just the latest variant on Handke's belief that literature belongs in an “ivory tower”, that it can be an autonomous pleasure-dome of language. His career has been a struggle against the confinements and sclerosis of language and a search for a cleansed, innocent vision.

In Repetition, Filip Kobal recalls a cross-border pilgrimage in his youth to the Yugoslavia of his forbears, with only his...