Peter Handke

The avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright examines his mother's life, which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy, ending in suicide; while recording his rage over the problems that his mother left for him to solve after her death.

A Life Story

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

a life story

A sorrow beyond dreams

Boxuan Mao

Handle’s Writing Degree Zero —— It is not a lack of emotion, nor it is getting rid of emotion; on the contrary, it is to reduce the surging and full emotion to freezing point, sublime the flower of rationality, so that the writer can write objectively, and calmly.

Clement Yue

Erzählung.

Wunschloses Unglück

Alex Noble

Mat Connor

Molly M

Aaron McCollough

Indra Enfors

Trever

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke--“the extravagantly talented Austrian playwright of chutzpah, novelist of sensibility, poet of linguistic games” (Kirkus)--ponders the life and early death of his mother "The Sunday edition of the Kärntner 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.'" So opens A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Handke's reckoning with his mother's life--which spanned the rise of the Nazis, World War II, and postwar suffering--and death. Both stark and lyrical, full of love, anger, admiration, and a keen sense of history, this slim book reveals Handke at his most lucid and direct. It is the most moving and accessible work in his distinguished career; it is "indispensable" (Bill Marx, The Boston Globe).

Emily Perkovich

Mirella Hetekivi

Mark Wadley

Donald

Mary Coggins

Patrick Hawley

Winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature "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 news of her suicide." So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as he perceives them. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. Yet well into middle age, living in the Austrian village of her birth, she still remains haunted by her dreams.

Laura

Erzählung

Wunschloses Unglück

sara gerner

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams A Life Story