Customer Reviews

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (New York Review Books Classics)

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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.

At once stark and lyrical, Handke's A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS is one of the finest memoirs I've read, and, without a doubt, the strongest portrait I know of a mother by her son--a portrait made strong, in part, by Handke's ability to see and analyze his mother's life within the context of the limited choices available to her, and by his ability to see the ways in which her life is molded by the "genre" of a life comparable to a woman of his mother's class and station. It is, too, at once loving and mercilessly painful. I'm not a great fan of Handke's--the intensity of his self-consciousness, or the cool ironic stances of his early work--but this brief book is an exception. Read it & you will be reading it again throughout your life.

A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS details the struggles of Austrian author Peter Handke to tell the story of his mother's life and of his relationship to her. Vigorously resisting cliched description, Handke's portrait of Maria Handke is a non-drama of post war suffering, poverty, and the vain attempt to achieve middle-class happiness. But the novella also provides a moving testament of the author's often unwilling love and admiration for his mother, and his solidarity with her decision to take her own life.

A must read for anyone interested in mother-son relationships, autobiography, German lit, postmodernism, and gender. It's unique and unforgettable.

Glad to see this back in print. I've relied on a library copy when I wanted to revisit it. Spend the hour or two it takes to read this and it will stick with you forever. I hope they've touched up the few missteps in Mannheim's translation. Otherwise, this near-perfect memoir puts most of its flabby and narcissistic successors (the list is endless) to shame.

In 1972, the author's mother took her own life by overdosing on sleeping pills, after an unremarkable life of 51 years that was marred by poverty, depression, neurogenic pain, and especially the limited opportunities available to her. After the initial "dull speechlessness" he experienced after receiving the news of her death, Handke was proud that his mother had taken the affirmative step to end her suffering. Soon afterward, he decided to write about her life, before the need to do so faded away.

The account of her life and demise is unique, in that he chooses to write about her in relation to other women of her era and socioeconomical status. She is born in a small Austrian village to a struggling family, and is described as a high-spirited child and a good student. She is taken out of school by her parents once her compulsory education ends, then runs away to Berlin as a teenager to pursue opportunities that her village and parents cannot offer her. After bearing a child out of wedlock to the love of her life, she agrees to marry a man whom she does not love or respect, in order to provide for herself and her child in post-war Germany. She sinks back into the life that she had sought escape, and ultimately moves back with her family to her home village. In her remaining days she is an embittered woman who frightens her children and is emotionally separated from her emasculated husband, yet she becomes more independent and full of life before developing the chronic pain and depression that ultimately led to her suicide.

I found A Sorrow Beyond Dreams somewhat difficult and less than enjoyable, primarily because of the author's use of abstraction to distance himself from and depersonalize his mother. We only get brief glimpses into her personality, and into what made her unique from other similar women, which would have made this a much more interesting book for me. The book is well written and brief (76 pages), and sufficiently unique that it may be of interest to a limited audience of readers.

"The Sunday edition of the Kärnter Volkszeitung carried the following item under 'Local News': 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'"

That's the opening of Peter Handke's 96-page account about the suicide of his mother. It takes perhaps an hour to read. But like the best of Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams stays with you, both as an example of great writing and, even more, as a chronicle of a representative German life.

Handke is not widely known in America, which may be just as well --- he has always courted controversy and taken unpopular positions. In 1966, when he was just 24, he achieved the kind of reaction that only a few playwrights crave; during a performance of his play ''Offending the Audience,'' theatergoers actually become so infuriated that they rushed the stage. The next year, at a conference at Princeton University, he accused Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll of writing "mere description'' about social issues. In 1996, he wrote that Western media demonized the Serbs during the Balkan War. And in 2006, at the funeral of Slobodan Milosaevic, Handke spoke --- in Serbian --- in support of the man whom many regard as a war criminal.

Long before his recent unpopularity, Handke was the Bright Young Man of German writing. "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams", written in two months in 1972, is the best argument for that exalted reputation. Ironically, it's not a literary document. It's a horror story, pure and simple.

Handke's mother --- he never gives her a name --- grew up happy. Her father had done what no peasant in his family had managed: He owned a house. He saved prodigiously, lost his money in the inflation of the 1920s; he scrimped again, only to lose his money in the Depression. Still, his daughter was "high-spirited", an attractive girl with no sense that adulthood for uneducated women was a crushing series of reduced expectations.

So Handke's mother didn't see World War II as a nightmare; for her, it was an adventure that broke the bonds of her limited world. ("'We were kind of excited,' my mother told me. 'For the first time, people did things together.'") She met a married soldier, became pregnant (with Peter), then sealed her fate with a marriage to a soldier she didn't love. Another child followed. And a self-administered abortion.

Her life was split; she had "a certain chic", but couldn't find a way to express it fully. And then, after the war, the "speechless moments of terror" begin. The husband drank. Which led to wife-beating. She kept silent, she "had learned her place."

Poverty ground her down. I'll spare you the account, which is exactingly described --- it's real poverty, not the movie kind. Handke struggles to remember the big things, the important things, but what he mostly finds is small, and all the sadder for smallness: "From her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held onto it when I walked beside her."

It's not a straight trip to the bottom. There's a sudden, final flowering. "My mother had not been crushed for good," Handke reports. She began to read, took an interest in politics. "She learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her."

It was too late. An animal despair overwhelmed her, sank her; her sorrow was so deep no one could rescue her. When he heard of her suicide, Handke writes that he was "beside myself with pride" --- she'd found a way out.

And so he began to evoke her life:

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her . . . dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide."

He does get beyond "dull speechlessness". But can a writer who sees himself as a writing machine break through to his true feelings? Will he get beyond the standard emotions to communicate the horror of a thwarted life? How, in the end, does a son tell the story of a mother whose only triumph may have been her death?

No account I have ever read of a woman's life by her child deals with such questions. "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" stands alone.

A contemporary masterpiece in the genre of the literary memoir, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is actually an unceasing nightmare where closure is not a possibility, primarily because it recounts the suicide of the author's mother, a woman whose desire for her own forged intellectual and independent identity is never completely made manifest. Peter Handke, one of Austria's preeminent authors and playwrites, looks painfully backward and assesses his mother's life, times and environment and tries to understand. In truth, by writing a recollection of his mother's unfulfilled life, he gave voice to the countless and nameless other women of his mother's generation, idealistic young adults who only got partly educated and then dismissed back to the rural villages for marriage, motherhood, house maintenance, cooking and eventually death. Social existence before and under Hitler was just one flat line, and circumstances would not allow for any kind of growth and mental development, a frustrating burden indeed for someone who yearned for more than just being an abused wife and a 24/7 pan scrubber. Deviating from the normal routine, Handke's mother would make indulgences from what was expected of her, from voting differently from what was expected of her to indulging in treats for herself as a gift for her own hard labors and efforts. However, those acts had to be done in silence, for there could be no walk off the path of scrimping, saving and struggling. To better herself, she started to read the college texts of her son, and while she valued the power of education that came from her reading, she too understood that it was too late for her to apply that learning to something practical and financial. From then on, her life is depicted as a downward spiral. But perhaps, her spiral sadly started after her birth.

By ending her life, she supposedly removed the shackles that were burdening her. She tried to flee from her emptiness, and it was quite palpable and consuming. "I'm not logical enough to think things through to the end, and my head aches. Sometimes it buzzes and whistles so that I can't bear any outside noise. I talk to myself, because I can't say anything to other people anymore. Sometimes I feel like a machine. I'd like to go away somewhere, but when it gets dark I'm afraid of not finding the way home again. In the morning there's dense fog and then everything is so quiet. Every day I do the same work, and every morning the place is a mess again. There's never any end to it. I really wish I were dead. When I'm out in the street and I see a car coming, I want to fall in front of it. But how can I be sure it would work?" Page 64. After contemplating and planning, Handke's wounded mother consumes all her sleeping and anti-depression pills but not before having her hair and nails done and selecting a brown two-piece dress, an act that conveys commitment, contentment and finality.

Upon of learning of his mother's suicide, Peter Handke flew back home and was immersed in a world of raw silent violence. He read about her act, which is depicted at the very beginning of the memoir: "The Sunday edition of the Karntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under "Local News": "In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51 committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills." Page five. Reading her namelessness and apparent insignificance in the article, it made him delve deeper into who she was and what her times were like and hence, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams was created, while, to quote the author, "My mother had been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide." Page five. In the book, he actually claims a measure of pride in his mother's horrific act, perhaps viewing it as a counterpoint to a horrible life. By redefining suicide and the stigma attached to it, I'm sure it allowed Handke to perhaps cope with the terrible and shocking aftermath a little bit better. In any event, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams was an intense read with sparse prose, a depiction of what dark times can do to a strong yet also vulnerable soul. A short and compelling read.

Peter Handke's slim memoir is necessarily sorrowful; it is about his mother's suicide. She was a survivor of the holocaust, and like many survivors, suffered from severe depression in the subsequent years. Handke's tone is cold, removed, and sepulchral. This is a vivid and moving text; it can not be easily categorized. It is non-fiction, but it is composed with the eye of a true artist.

Not a read for everyone, but definitely an impressive effort. It is a testament to the ultimate destruction of Europe during WWII, glimpsed through the microcosm of a single individual.

Though this purports to be a "holocaust" story, it is a biography of a woman (the writer's mother) who lived during that time but only slightly refers to the events of that period and their impact. It's more of "50's" women's story - the tamped down emotions, the "other-directedness" of the personality. This is mildly interesting but he is straddling his fence as a writer. It is his mother so he is backing off the subject, trying to be objective, but in doing so only gives us broad hints of the real problems in her life. Had it been tied more strongly to specifics of living through the holocaust as an average German woman, it would have had more to say about the mind of that time and how a woman came through that time and on to the rest of her life.