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Title: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Item Number: 9780374267209
Number: 1
Product Description: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780374267209
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780374267209
Rating: 4/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/72/09/9780374267209.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Ed Galvin
reviewed A Sorrow Beyond Dreams on February 08, 2015A HYMN TO TRAGEDY
It is a difficult proposition to write a memoir about the death of one’s mother, and that too when she commits suicide at the age of 51 ( I have a somber association with that number as my mother too passed away at that age) . A Sorrow beyond dreams is Handke's poignant account of his mother's life and death. Prosaic, poetic, elliptical and self-conscious, it is an exacting picture of the shock and grief that await those who have inherited the ruins of a suicide. Rarely in recent years has reading a mini masterpiece of just 76 pages had such a macro impact on my psyche.
The Austrian writer Peter Handke is one the greatest and most original novelists and playwrights writing in German language today. My exposure to his prose dates back to early 90’s when I was impressed with reading his novels like “ The Left-handed Woman†and major plays such as “ The Ride Across Lake Constanceâ€. When another Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, I wondered why they didn't bestow it on Peter Handke, a writer much more worthy of that prize (Jelenik too voiced in an interview that Handke deserved it better than her. Btw, I read Jelinek’s “The Piano Teacher†last year and was impressed with her prose too) . Well, Handke may never win a Nobel as he has been a controversial figure due to his involvement in Balkan Conflict and being a sympathizer of Slobodan Milosevic.
You can read this as a memoir or metafiction of a poor, sprightly and hearty woman in Austria, full curiosity and zest for life, who undergoes slow disintegration first due to the members of her family and the society around her (who chain her by not allowing to get education and gain independence) and then by the loveless relationships and associated miseries that drain her spirits and will to exist.
Peter Handke narrates the story of his mother from a totally impersonal and disinterested perspective. There are only few places where Handke addresses the woman as “My motherâ€, especially at the beginning :
“My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go 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 nerves of her suicide."
Handke adopts for his composition a deliberate formulation based on facts and the way he gets into the different stages in her life may seem like reading a resume of one’s life. He knows the vulnerability when writing about one’s own mother and therefore exerts great restraint in not allowing the words to slip into sentimentality and histrionics. His minimalistic approach in narrating her dull life drenched in drudgeries can be perceived from this passage:
“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.
No possibilities. It was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, a brief bewilderment then the alien resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the Kitchen-work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less. Inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's life: Tired / Exhausted / Sick / Dying / Dead. "
Born in a small Austrian village in the 1920s, Handke's mother—he keeps her nameless—lived in a world constrained by history and convention. Unlike many cloistered women in her village, Handke’s mother valiantly, though vainly, makes several attempts to streamline her life . She runs away from the soundless persecution at home, pursues a career at age fifteen, bears an illegitimate son (Peter Handke) from her first love – a saving-bank clerk who vanishes from her life as quickly as he emerges, marries a German army sergeant, and, after World War II, they settle in Berlin, where he works as a motor mechanic, who then degenerates into a drunkard subjecting her to routine torture. She bears a second child, aborts a third and grows old before her time. In 1948, they flee the eastern sector of the city and return to Austria, to the house where she was born . There she enjoys a brief spell of normalcy, picks up reading literature which turns out to be her true solace and involves herself in politics to regain her presence in society. Eventually, she succumbs to nervous breakdown brought up by the accumulated pain and slow atrophy of her life and finally blows it out with barbiturates.
"Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms," Handke writes; "poverty can only be intimated in symbols." The torture of maintaining outward appearances and rituals in this ‘hygienic poverty’ is a deep undercurrent in the novel:
“From the first she was under pressure to keep up the forms: in country schools the subject most stressed for girls was called “the outward form and appearance of written workâ€; in later life this found its continuation in a woman’s obligation to put on a semblance of a united family; not cheerful poverty but formally perfect squalor; and gradually, in its daily effort to up appearances, her face lost its soul.â€
“Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had WISHED for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.â€
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams grips us with Handke's unusual technique of compressed narration that succeeds to impart emotional intensity without emotionalizing the grey universe around her. He weaves a kaleidoscope by mixing memories, events, objects and casual statements . Passages are pregnant with irony too. Here are few examples:
"In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, gray mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separated parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held onto it when I walked beside her."
"Another way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you straightened up after hours of bending over… the eternal moaning about little aches and pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not “How are you feeling?†but “Are you feeling better?â€
"At home, of course, she was alone with the FOUR WALLS, some of the bounces was still there; a hummed tune, a dance step while taking off the shoes, a brief desire to jump out of her skin. And then she was dragging herself around the room again; from husband to child, from child to husband, and from one thing to another.
Fiction these days offers a lot of chaff, not in the case of this novel. Every paragraph or sentence in this memoir prompts one to pause, absorb, heave a sigh and then move forward with a lump in one's throat. Handke is a master in using syncopated sentences, one-liners, wrenching associations, cold enumerations and slots of silences which cumulatively deepen the impact of the tragedy.
There is an intentional interlude at page 46 where Peter Handke as writer casts doubts on himself and questions whether his modus operandi of writing the memoir has any merit:
“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 literary ritual in which individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.
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 the facts are so overwhelming and there is hardly anything to think out.â€
At the end, Handke recounts his flight home for the funeral and confesses: "I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide," as if she had finally availed herself of the only freedom remaining to her. It is a stunning line. This is followed by two pages of aphoristic observations and his incapacity to separate him from the protagonist in narrating her life:
"It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror."
And the last line of the memoir accentuates his sense of incompleteness.
“Someday, I shall write about all this in greater detail.â€
Considering that this memoir was written in 1972 when Handke was only 31, one marvels at the maturity, stylistic virtuosity and thematic integrity he has demonstrated in this magnum Opus. Elegant simplicity, purity and austerity- seldom encountered in prose these days- are the hallmarks of this work. I have now decided to get all his important works and start my new journey in the postmodern fiction of Handke.
A Sorrow beyond dreams is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, the story of woman whose lively spirit was crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. I underscore what W G Sebald said about Peter Handke : “The specific narrative genre he developed succeeded by dint of its completely original linguistic and imaginative precision, through which – in works such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior.â€
Conclusion: Highly recommended to all readers of postmodern fiction.
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