SHORT VERSION:Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) is a stroke of genius! LONGER:A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a short story about the suicide of a poor, sad and disillusioned Austrian woman who happened also to be Peter Handke’s mother. The book was written in 1972, shortly after the woman’s death.This is how the story begins: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.’In the pages that follow Handke will refer to his mother as “she” or “you,” but rarely as “my mother” and never by name. He will not make his own mother into a character, therefore he decides to write sentences that will be applicable not only to his mother but to “the biography of a woman with my mother’s particular life.”FeminismThe biography of a woman with my mother’s particular life? (Could anyone else have had his mother’s particular life???)For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men; a girl’s future was a joke. (12)In her childhood and even more in her young girlhood, “Aren’t you ashamed?” or “You ought to be ashamed!” had rung in her ears like a litany. In this rural, Catholic environment, any suggestion that a woman might have a life of her own was an impertinence … even joy was something to be ashamed of; … (23)Handke’s raw and simple attitude towards his subject (this woman, who might have been anyone, but who happens to have been his mother) creates a truthful and considerate portrait of the life of women in interwar Europe. By describing the indecent discrimination against his mother, he makes the life and suffering of all women visible.PoeticsPoetics, to take it back to Aristotle, where the category began, is distinguished from theoria and praxis in the primacy of its activity of making. Poetics is the active questioning about how does, how should, how could, art be made.In this very personal biography of his mother, which is not, according to Handke, shaped as a memoir, but as a text which subject could have been anybody with the specific life of his mother, Handke also develop a poetics. (Poetic from Greek poietin: to make). Here are some of Handke’s thoughts on making:Of course what is written here about a particular person is rater general; …(He believes anything else would have been too personal and not of interest to anyone but himself)The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten – like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is a literary ritual in which an individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext. (31)These two dangers – the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences – have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where facts are so overwhelming that there is hardly anything to think about. (32)Ethics; “… my sentences crash in the darkness and lie scattered on the paper”In stories we often read that something or other is ‘unnamable’ or ‘indescribable’; ordinarily this strikes me as a cheap excuse. This story, however, is really about the nameless, about speechless moments of terror. (34)… extreme need to communicate coincide with extreme speechlessness. That is why I affect the usual biographical pattern and write: ‘At that time … later,’ ‘Because … although,’ ‘was … became … became nothing,’ hoping in this way to dominate horror. That, perhaps, is the comical part of my story. (34)In a state of unfathomable grief Handke still manages to discuss how and why art should be made. It’s an exceptional performance - outstanding.So, lets end where we started, with the SHORT VERSION:Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) is a stroke of genius
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.
What do You think about A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (2002)?
This short work opens with a kick to the stomach, the clean, brutal newspaper announcement of the death, by suicide, of Handke's mother. Such tragedy though, we soon learn, isn't something limited merely to the moment. In an attempt to make sense of this ending (or a beginning), and to come to terms with the act itself, the author paints an astonishing words-and-ideas portrait of her life from youth through to death. It makes for harrowing but compelling reading and in the process also gives us
—Billy O'Callaghan
I wasn't sure about this at first. A lot of the set up involved little philosophical squiggles that I didn't much care about. But then it slid out of that and into a beautiful elegy, memoir, portrait. Here are lines I liked:"What she said about books could not have been put into print; she merely told me what had particularly caught her attention. 'I'm not like that,' she sometimes said, as though the author had written about HER. To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject."and"Once, while mountain climbing with a group of friends, she started off to one side to relieve herself. I was ashamed of her and started to bawl, so she held it in."
—Erica
Briefly: In Jeffrey Eugenides introduction, readers are told, “In fact, German has two words for self-slaughter: Selbstmord, which is roughly equivalent to the English “suicide” and Freitod, which means literally “free death,” and possesses a certain brave, even heroic, connotation.” This puts me in mind of the character of Jessie in Marsha Norman’s unforgettable play, 'night, Mother, a play everyone should see, or read, or watch the Cissy Spacek/Anne Bancroft film. Both the play and Handke’s brief account of his mother’s suicide accomplish the conveyance of the Inevitable Now.She felt free—but there was nothing she could do about it.*****************Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms, poverty can only be described in symbols.****************** “I can’t talk. Don’t torture me.” She turned away, turned again, turned further away. Then she had to close her eyes, and silent tears ran uselessly down her averted face.While Handke’s account is factual, it reads like a novella, making concluding remarks ominous with a sense of foreboding (foreshadowing).4.5 stars, rounded up, for its accomplishment and reminding me about Norman’s powerful play.
—Mike Puma
