A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

»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.«

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.

»Moving and beautifully realized« Richard Locke, The New York Times Book Review

»A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Handke's masterpiece, a short, concentrated, mysteriously exhaustive portrait of his mother, from whom history and circumstance have removed most traces of an identity.« J. S. Marcus, The New York Review of Books

»Indispensable« Bill Marx, The Boston Globe

»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

»A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is moving and urgent. No doubt some of the best Peter Handke has written to date.« Henriette Bacher Lind, Jyllands-Posten

»With the masterpiece about his mother's suicide, Handke shows how language is a prison that in the age of patriarchy never offered the woman an actual ›self‹ to kill.« Simon Lund Petersen, POV

»I will not hesitate to call his most important, his most essential work, and a book one should definitely take the time to read« Jørgen Herman Monrad, Weekendavisen