A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Written after his mother’s suicide, this short book is Handke’s attempt to write honestly about a life that had been shaped entirely by circumstance, and his simultaneous confrontation with whether writing can do that at all. It is one of the most unsettling things in modern literature.

Why Start Here

Handke writes about his mother while writing about the impossibility of writing about his mother. He uses clichés deliberately, then interrogates them; he constructs a portrait and then dismantles it. This could be an intellectual exercise, but it isn’t, the grief is real and the book makes you feel it, precisely because Handke refuses to aestheticize it cleanly.

At seventy pages, it takes an afternoon. But it poses questions about the limits of literary language that will stay with you through everything else you read. It is the clearest demonstration of what Handke is doing when he’s at his best.

What to Expect

A hybrid of memoir and essay, with a raw, searching quality. Handke speaks directly to the reader, breaks the frame, circles back. It’s unlike almost anything else, the closest comparison might be Barthes’s Mourning Diary, but A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is angrier and more formally restless.