A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story

"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 walke

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.

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.

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.