'In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the author confronts his mother's suicide in a compelling story that is like an explanation of a recurrent dream, a dream so vividly expressed it becomes our dream.' - Chicago Sun Times
Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her lifewhich spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economyshe struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: "I'm not human any more." Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams her son sits down to record what he knows, or thinks he knows, about his mother's life and death before, in his words, "the dull speechlessnessthe extreme speechlessness" of grief takes hold forever. And yet the experience of speechlessness, as it marks both suffering and love, lies at the heart of Handke's brief but unforgettable elegy. This austere, scrupulous, and deeply moving book is one of the finest achievements of a great contemporary writer.
'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Handke's masterpiece, a short, concentrated, mysteriously exhaustive portrait of his mother. It is about necessity and futility, about the incompleteness, the inadequacy, of language, of grieving, of filial love, and finally of identity itself. The book is strikingly original, and unbearably sad.' - J. S. Marcus
