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Rating: 
Summary: a postmodern biography with depth, bite, and poignance
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The finest auto/biographical work I know
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Short,Brutal and Unforgettable
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Short,Brutal and Unforgettable
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Review: In several dozen pages, Peter Handke gives an overview of his mother's life up to and including her suicide in late 1971. In spare and unsentimental prose, the reader sees a woman (the last of five siblings) grow into a vibrant and vivacious creature in 1930s Germany. An affair with an older married man produces a child; long after he is gone from her life, she fosters the illusion that he was her one true love. (Never mind that their meeting years later is awkward and stilted at best.) In a subsequent loveless marriage with an alcoholic and abusive man, Handke's mother is slowly destroyed by stifled dreams, societal expectations, and stony resignation. Handke's insistence on remaining detached is the only problematical aspect of this otherwise elegant memoir. He makes a valiant attempt, but it just doesn't work for this type of book. The reader only comes close to empathizing with his mother; the full embrace is not there. Moreover, the authorial intrusions seem to be too much of a postmodern literary trick and interrupt the flow of the narrative. Every instance that Handke steers the book towards the aspect of the writing process itself is a misstep. (A memoirist who accomplishes this more skillfully is the French writer Annie Ernaux.) "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" is a worthwhile read and ultimately a fine tribute, yet the reader yearns for the more detailed version that the author promises with the very last sentence of his book.
Rating:
Summary: A Sensitively Valuable Elegy
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Sensitively Valuable Elegy
Review: 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.
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