'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams'

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews and discusses Peter Handke's novel, 'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams'. According to the paper, 'A Sorrow Beyond Dreams' is a non-fiction book that relates, in a series of disrupted fragments, the life and suicide of Maria Handke, the author's mother. The paper further discusses how the book focuses both on the personal and emotional life of Handke's mother and on the social context that was partly responsible for her misfortunes.

From the Paper:

"The book comes only a few moths after the painful event that caused it- the suicide of the author's mother, and thus captures Handke's division between his feeling of loss and sorrow as a son, and his struggle to give an account of this feeling, as a writer. Every human death can seem unreal and puzzling , and this is even more so when the death is the cause of the suicide. Suicide seems to place every certainty we might have about ourselves and the world around us, under doubt. The main coordinates of the book are loss, displacement and exile and all of these are connected with Handke's struggle as a writer trying to express the horror and banality of the suicide event. On the one hand, the loss of the mother causes pain and makes it difficult for him to externalize the experience in his writing, and at the same time, the author has to displace the pain he is feeling and to translate it into his work. This detachment that the son has to perform to become a writer is a form of self-alienation or exile."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Handke, Peter A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975
• Klinkowitz, Jerome The Self Apparent Word, Fiction as Language, Language as Fiction Illinois : Southern Illinois Press, 1994
• Wertheimer, Alison A Special Scar: The Experience of the People Bereaved by Suicide, New York: Routledge, 2001

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