A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Very thin book. Quie overpriced.

Very powerful story of the lamentable sad life of the author's mother. While also celebrating the courage and tenacity she showed. The kind of writing that has earned Peter Handke the Nobel Literature Prize.

With thanks to the New York Review Books, Peter Handke's A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS is once again available. This slim but pungent volume opens with an elegant introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides ( author of 'Middlesex' and 'The Virgin Suicides' ) and few writers could better place this memoir of Handke's response to his mother's suicide in 1971 in a more meaningful perspective.Handke writes about his mother in a way that creates a story rather than a history of a life. There is so much understantding of how the world changed from Pre-WW II through the post war emptiness of a desecrated Europe and its accompanying slow move toward healing that plagues burned countries after victories or defeats signalling the end of wars. Handke's mother remains nameless which serves to make her a more universal figure than just another individual. And using the word 'individual' is actually in contrast to the major problem of this tragic women's life. Always a women of poverty, suffering the cruelties that that station in life suggests (a fatherless child, a marriage of convenience that results in a life with an alcoholic husban, self induced abortions, begging for food, the lack of simple luxuries like Christmas gifts, etc) his mother was not a woman who considered herself an individual: she was a daughter of a postwar poverty and gloom, aligning herself with Socialism which further negated her worth as a unique person. Her gradual withdrawal in yet another group (those with 'nervous breakdowns') overtured her ultimate complete withdrawal from the world as she finds taking her own life the final solution to her grief.Handke reserves his own response to the loss of his mother until the end of this memoir - a section of memories, flashbacks, regrets and tears that force him to place his final godbyes in the form of the written word. The writing is powerful in its simplicity, unfettered by false emotions, straight forward in forcing both the author and the reader into confronting the tragedy of suicide. Perhaps many readers will use this short tome to find healing of like experiences: others will read this book simply because it is a beautifully constructed story of the life on an Everyman/woman. Highly Recommended.

handke writes about the life and death of his mother like a man who knows there is much to say, but that he is not yet prepared to venture there. his mother's death by suicide has opened a channel in his life that will only deepen with time. he recognizes that it is essential to uncover the facts while remaining wary of the a novelist's tendency to speculate and fictionalize. handke resists these writerly temptations admirably. it is the courage of the narrator in search of the woman who was his mother that makes the book a work of literature.

It is grief and attempts to understand a lost mother !Beautifully written !Even in translation the language is so rich !

A well written and insightful work about the suicide of the author’s mother.