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Title: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story by Peter Handke, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 1-59017-019-9 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Sensitively Valuable Elegy
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Short,Brutal and Unforgettable
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: The finest auto/biographical work I know
Comment: 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.
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Title: Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa (New York Review Books) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paul Auster ISBN: 1590170423 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Moon and the Bonfires (New York Review Books Classics) by Cesare Pavese, R. W. Flint, Mark Rudman ISBN: 1590170210 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon, Marc Romano, Lawrence G. Blochman, Joyce Carol Oates ISBN: 159017044X Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster ISBN: 0140106286 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia, Romano Carlin ISBN: 1590170628 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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