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A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life, which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy, she 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 speechlessness—the 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.
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 speechlessness—the 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.
76 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Peter Handke
360 books1,051 followersPeter Handke (* 6. Dezember 1942 in Griffen, Kärnten) ist ein österreichischer Schriftsteller und Übersetzer.
Peter Handke is an Avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. He has also collaborated with German director Wim Wenders, writing the script for The Wrong Move and co-writing the screenplay for Wings of Desire.
Peter Handke is an Avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright. His body of work has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. He has also collaborated with German director Wim Wenders, writing the script for The Wrong Move and co-writing the screenplay for Wings of Desire.
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September 19, 2024
I chose to read Peter Handke due to a trip to Klagenfurt, which is situated in Carinthia, the Austrian region where the author was born. Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2019 and he was the only remaining winner I haven’t read from the last 10 winners.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, as the name suggest is possibly one of the worse books to take with you on a Holiday. It is very bleak but, thankfully, short. It is actually a memoir about the author’s mother suicide.
I did not care much about the fragmented writing style in the beginning, but it somehow grew on me and I started to understand why he received the Nobel. Still, I was happy it ended so quickly. I am glad I familiarized myself with the author but I have no plans to read him further.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, as the name suggest is possibly one of the worse books to take with you on a Holiday. It is very bleak but, thankfully, short. It is actually a memoir about the author’s mother suicide.
I did not care much about the fragmented writing style in the beginning, but it somehow grew on me and I started to understand why he received the Nobel. Still, I was happy it ended so quickly. I am glad I familiarized myself with the author but I have no plans to read him further.
March 9, 2018
I came to this slim novella through Maggie Nelson, who recommends it in RED PARTS. It is the story of Handke's mother's suicide, and his rapid attempts to capture it and her life through writing. Handke is a strange, wonderful writer and I raced through the early part of this with pleasure, as he constructed a profile of his mother's life in Germany before her stagnancy set in. (I was particularly interested in how backgrounded WW2 was - Hitler, just a voice on the radio.)
The writing about her death was beautiful as well, and strongly reminiscent of that magic scene in THE ARGONAUTS with Harry and his mother. Handke's relief, and the odd love that explodes out of him when alone with his mother's body, was touching and gratifying. And yet, for all that I liked, there are major holes in this work (the absent father; the step-father's abuse; some sort of compassion for his mother), and I found myself dragging through the middle third. What I was expecting to be a one day read took about a week, and though I think A.S.B.D. is pedagogically fascinating and of great use to writers, it struck me as something of a missed opportunity.
The writing about her death was beautiful as well, and strongly reminiscent of that magic scene in THE ARGONAUTS with Harry and his mother. Handke's relief, and the odd love that explodes out of him when alone with his mother's body, was touching and gratifying. And yet, for all that I liked, there are major holes in this work (the absent father; the step-father's abuse; some sort of compassion for his mother), and I found myself dragging through the middle third. What I was expecting to be a one day read took about a week, and though I think A.S.B.D. is pedagogically fascinating and of great use to writers, it struck me as something of a missed opportunity.
March 3, 2015
A HYMN TO TRAGEDY
It is a difficult proposition to write a memoir about the death of one’s mother, and that too when she commits suicide at the age of 51 ( I have a somber association with that number as my mother too passed away at that age) . A Sorrow beyond dreams is Handke's poignant account of his mother's life and death. Prosaic, poetic, elliptical and self-conscious, it is an exacting picture of the shock and grief that await those who have inherited the ruins of a suicide. Rarely in recent years has reading a mini masterpiece of just 76 pages had such a macro impact on my psyche.
The Austrian writer Peter Handke is one the greatest and most original novelists and playwrights writing in German language today. My exposure to his prose dates back to early 90’s when I was impressed with reading his novels like “ The Left-handed Woman” and major plays such as “ The Ride Across Lake Constance”. When another Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, I wondered why they didn't bestow it on Peter Handke, a writer much more worthy of that prize (Jelenik too voiced in an interview that Handke deserved it better than her. Btw, I read Jelinek’s “The Piano Teacher” last year and was impressed with her prose too) . Well, Handke may never win a Nobel as he has been a controversial figure due to his involvement in Balkan Conflict and being a sympathizer of Slobodan Milosevic.
You can read this as a memoir or metafiction of a poor, sprightly and hearty woman in Austria, full curiosity and zest for life, who undergoes slow disintegration first due to the members of her family and the society around her (who chain her by not allowing to get education and gain independence) and then by the loveless relationships and associated miseries that drain her spirits and will to exist.
Peter Handke narrates the story of his mother from a totally impersonal and disinterested perspective. There are only few places where Handke addresses the woman as “My mother”, especially at the beginning :
“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."
Handke adopts for his composition a deliberate formulation based on facts and the way he gets into the different stages in her life may seem like reading a resume of one’s life. He knows the vulnerability when writing about one’s own mother and therefore exerts great restraint in not allowing the words to slip into sentimentality and histrionics. His minimalistic approach in narrating her dull life drenched in drudgeries can be perceived from this passage:
“For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke.
No possibilities. It was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, a brief bewilderment then the alien resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the Kitchen-work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less. Inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's life: Tired / Exhausted / Sick / Dying / Dead. "
Born in a small Austrian village in the 1920s, Handke's mother—he keeps her nameless—lived in a world constrained by history and convention. Unlike many cloistered women in her village, Handke’s mother valiantly, though vainly, makes several attempts to streamline her life . She runs away from the soundless persecution at home, pursues a career at age fifteen, bears an illegitimate son (Peter Handke) from her first love – a saving-bank clerk who vanishes from her life as quickly as he emerges, marries a German army sergeant, and, after World War II, they settle in Berlin, where he works as a motor mechanic, who then degenerates into a drunkard subjecting her to routine torture. She bears a second child, aborts a third and grows old before her time. In 1948, they flee the eastern sector of the city and return to Austria, to the house where she was born . There she enjoys a brief spell of normalcy, picks up reading literature which turns out to be her true solace and involves herself in politics to regain her presence in society. Eventually, she succumbs to nervous breakdown brought up by the accumulated pain and slow atrophy of her life and finally blows it out with barbiturates.
"Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms," Handke writes; "poverty can only be intimated in symbols." The torture of maintaining outward appearances and rituals in this ‘hygienic poverty’ is a deep undercurrent in the novel:
“From the first she was under pressure to keep up the forms: in country schools the subject most stressed for girls was called “the outward form and appearance of written work”; in later life this found its continuation in a woman’s obligation to put on a semblance of a united family; not cheerful poverty but formally perfect squalor; and gradually, in its daily effort to up appearances, her face lost its soul.”
“Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had WISHED for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.”
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams grips us with Handke's unusual technique of compressed narration that succeeds to impart emotional intensity without emotionalizing the grey universe around her. He weaves a kaleidoscope by mixing memories, events, objects and casual statements . Passages are pregnant with irony too. Here are few examples:
"In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, gray mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separated parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held onto it when I walked beside her."
"Another way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you straightened up after hours of bending over… the eternal moaning about little aches and pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not “How are you feeling?” but “Are you feeling better?”
"At home, of course, she was alone with the FOUR WALLS, some of the bounces was still there; a hummed tune, a dance step while taking off the shoes, a brief desire to jump out of her skin. And then she was dragging herself around the room again; from husband to child, from child to husband, and from one thing to another.
Fiction these days offers a lot of chaff, not in the case of this novel. Every paragraph or sentence in this memoir prompts one to pause, absorb, heave a sigh and then move forward with a lump in one's throat. Handke is a master in using syncopated sentences, one-liners, wrenching associations, cold enumerations and slots of silences which cumulatively deepen the impact of the tragedy.
There is an intentional interlude at page 46 where Peter Handke as writer casts doubts on himself and questions whether his modus operandi of writing the memoir has any merit:
“The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten ��� like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is literary ritual in which individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.
These two dangers – the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences – have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where the facts are so overwhelming and there is hardly anything to think out.”
At the end, Handke recounts his flight home for the funeral and confesses: "I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide," as if she had finally availed herself of the only freedom remaining to her. It is a stunning line. This is followed by two pages of aphoristic observations and his incapacity to separate him from the protagonist in narrating her life:
"It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror."
And the last line of the memoir accentuates his sense of incompleteness.
“Someday, I shall write about all this in greater detail.”
Considering that this memoir was written in 1972 when Handke was only 31, one marvels at the maturity, stylistic virtuosity and thematic integrity he has demonstrated in this magnum Opus. Elegant simplicity, purity and austerity- seldom encountered in prose these days- are the hallmarks of this work. I have now decided to get all his important works and start my new journey in the postmodern fiction of Handke.
A Sorrow beyond dreams is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, the story of woman whose lively spirit was crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. I underscore what W G Sebald said about Peter Handke : “The specific narrative genre he developed succeeded by dint of its completely original linguistic and imaginative precision, through which – in works such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior.”
Conclusion: Highly recommended to all readers of postmodern fiction.
It is a difficult proposition to write a memoir about the death of one’s mother, and that too when she commits suicide at the age of 51 ( I have a somber association with that number as my mother too passed away at that age) . A Sorrow beyond dreams is Handke's poignant account of his mother's life and death. Prosaic, poetic, elliptical and self-conscious, it is an exacting picture of the shock and grief that await those who have inherited the ruins of a suicide. Rarely in recent years has reading a mini masterpiece of just 76 pages had such a macro impact on my psyche.
The Austrian writer Peter Handke is one the greatest and most original novelists and playwrights writing in German language today. My exposure to his prose dates back to early 90’s when I was impressed with reading his novels like “ The Left-handed Woman” and major plays such as “ The Ride Across Lake Constance”. When another Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, I wondered why they didn't bestow it on Peter Handke, a writer much more worthy of that prize (Jelenik too voiced in an interview that Handke deserved it better than her. Btw, I read Jelinek’s “The Piano Teacher” last year and was impressed with her prose too) . Well, Handke may never win a Nobel as he has been a controversial figure due to his involvement in Balkan Conflict and being a sympathizer of Slobodan Milosevic.
You can read this as a memoir or metafiction of a poor, sprightly and hearty woman in Austria, full curiosity and zest for life, who undergoes slow disintegration first due to the members of her family and the society around her (who chain her by not allowing to get education and gain independence) and then by the loveless relationships and associated miseries that drain her spirits and will to exist.
Peter Handke narrates the story of his mother from a totally impersonal and disinterested perspective. There are only few places where Handke addresses the woman as “My mother”, especially at the beginning :
“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."
Handke adopts for his composition a deliberate formulation based on facts and the way he gets into the different stages in her life may seem like reading a resume of one’s life. He knows the vulnerability when writing about one’s own mother and therefore exerts great restraint in not allowing the words to slip into sentimentality and histrionics. His minimalistic approach in narrating her dull life drenched in drudgeries can be perceived from this passage:
“For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke.
No possibilities. It was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few giggles, a brief bewilderment then the alien resigned look of a woman starting to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the Kitchen-work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less. Inner monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled. The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's life: Tired / Exhausted / Sick / Dying / Dead. "
Born in a small Austrian village in the 1920s, Handke's mother—he keeps her nameless—lived in a world constrained by history and convention. Unlike many cloistered women in her village, Handke’s mother valiantly, though vainly, makes several attempts to streamline her life . She runs away from the soundless persecution at home, pursues a career at age fifteen, bears an illegitimate son (Peter Handke) from her first love – a saving-bank clerk who vanishes from her life as quickly as he emerges, marries a German army sergeant, and, after World War II, they settle in Berlin, where he works as a motor mechanic, who then degenerates into a drunkard subjecting her to routine torture. She bears a second child, aborts a third and grows old before her time. In 1948, they flee the eastern sector of the city and return to Austria, to the house where she was born . There she enjoys a brief spell of normalcy, picks up reading literature which turns out to be her true solace and involves herself in politics to regain her presence in society. Eventually, she succumbs to nervous breakdown brought up by the accumulated pain and slow atrophy of her life and finally blows it out with barbiturates.
"Squalid misery can be described in concrete terms," Handke writes; "poverty can only be intimated in symbols." The torture of maintaining outward appearances and rituals in this ‘hygienic poverty’ is a deep undercurrent in the novel:
“From the first she was under pressure to keep up the forms: in country schools the subject most stressed for girls was called “the outward form and appearance of written work”; in later life this found its continuation in a woman’s obligation to put on a semblance of a united family; not cheerful poverty but formally perfect squalor; and gradually, in its daily effort to up appearances, her face lost its soul.”
“Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had WISHED for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.”
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams grips us with Handke's unusual technique of compressed narration that succeeds to impart emotional intensity without emotionalizing the grey universe around her. He weaves a kaleidoscope by mixing memories, events, objects and casual statements . Passages are pregnant with irony too. Here are few examples:
"In general, these memories are inhabited more by things than by people: a dancing top in a deserted street amid ruins, oat flakes in a sugar spoon, gray mucus in a tin spittoon with a Russian trademark; of people, only separated parts: hair, cheeks, knotted scars on fingers; from her childhood days my mother had a swollen scar on her index finger; I held onto it when I walked beside her."
"Another way of listing would be equally idyllic: your aching back; your hands scalded in the wash boiler, then frozen red while hanging up the clothes (how the frozen washing crackled as you folded it up!); an occasional nosebleed when you straightened up after hours of bending over… the eternal moaning about little aches and pains, because after all you were only a woman. Women among themselves: not “How are you feeling?” but “Are you feeling better?”
"At home, of course, she was alone with the FOUR WALLS, some of the bounces was still there; a hummed tune, a dance step while taking off the shoes, a brief desire to jump out of her skin. And then she was dragging herself around the room again; from husband to child, from child to husband, and from one thing to another.
Fiction these days offers a lot of chaff, not in the case of this novel. Every paragraph or sentence in this memoir prompts one to pause, absorb, heave a sigh and then move forward with a lump in one's throat. Handke is a master in using syncopated sentences, one-liners, wrenching associations, cold enumerations and slots of silences which cumulatively deepen the impact of the tragedy.
There is an intentional interlude at page 46 where Peter Handke as writer casts doubts on himself and questions whether his modus operandi of writing the memoir has any merit:
“The danger of all these abstractions and formulations is of course that they tend to become independent. When that happens, the individual that gave rise to them is forgotten ��� like images in a dream, phrases and sentences enter into a chain reaction, and the result is literary ritual in which individual life ceases to be anything more than a pretext.
These two dangers – the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences – have slowed down my writing, because in every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is true of every literary effort, but especially in this case, where the facts are so overwhelming and there is hardly anything to think out.”
At the end, Handke recounts his flight home for the funeral and confesses: "I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide," as if she had finally availed herself of the only freedom remaining to her. It is a stunning line. This is followed by two pages of aphoristic observations and his incapacity to separate him from the protagonist in narrating her life:
"It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding and, breathless with horror, feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror."
And the last line of the memoir accentuates his sense of incompleteness.
“Someday, I shall write about all this in greater detail.”
Considering that this memoir was written in 1972 when Handke was only 31, one marvels at the maturity, stylistic virtuosity and thematic integrity he has demonstrated in this magnum Opus. Elegant simplicity, purity and austerity- seldom encountered in prose these days- are the hallmarks of this work. I have now decided to get all his important works and start my new journey in the postmodern fiction of Handke.
A Sorrow beyond dreams is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, the story of woman whose lively spirit was crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. I underscore what W G Sebald said about Peter Handke : “The specific narrative genre he developed succeeded by dint of its completely original linguistic and imaginative precision, through which – in works such as The Goalie’s Anxiety or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – the author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior.”
Conclusion: Highly recommended to all readers of postmodern fiction.
August 14, 2022
Trenuci užasa uvijek su kratkotrajni; prije je to osjećanje nečeg nestvarnog nego baš užas.
Handke je putnik na neprestanom bespuću. Ne dešava se možda tako često da te pisac uvuče u jednu ukočenu ozbiljnost, pri kojoj ti njeguje misli prizorima koji su kristalno jasni, da ti ne treba durbin kojim ćeš ih približiti i uklesati u svoje mrežnjače. Velike teškoće sustizale su mladog Petera, a ponajviše njegovu majku, Mariju Handke. Velika Depresija, totalna kontrola i pogibija ljudi u Njemačkom Rajhu, te nagli rast posljeratne potrošačke ekonomije izazvaće pometnju u njenom životnom duhu. Mišljenja sam da su nju nedaće držale stamenom, i da su joj krotkost i požrtvovnost onih koji su zahvaćeni zlom - pružali nekakav vid nade. A onda nastupa podmukliji i hladniji period od Hladnog rata; gdje praznina i strah od iste počinje da izjeda ljudske duše. Odjednom na pozornicu izranja neman, Kafkina "Amerika" sa mravinjakom oblakodera u kojima liftovi kao da nekuda žure - sumanuti jure gore-dole, ulice zakrčene automobila kroz koje se pješaci provlače kao da je tu pravi prolaz, ne obazirući se da li u automobilu sjedi čovjek ili možda magarac.
Letimičan pogled na sadržaj ovog djela ukazuje na metafizičku hladnoću koja prosto mrzne krv. U svojoj jezičkoj indiferentnosti, Handke nijedan trenutak ne odstupa od svojih zagasitih nagovještaja, već se drzne da ide do kraja tamnice, znajući da dna nema. Ono što mi se ponajviše svidjelo jeste što nema lascivnosti, primitivne podrugljivosti, izvještačene ironije već prikaz besmrtnosti jednog života.
November 20, 2020
What’s in a name – this is described as a semi-autobiographical novel but it’s really a memoir, just that, written in the white hot anguish left behind by Peter Handke’s mother who committed suicide at the age of 51 in 1971. This memoir was published the following year.
The very ordinary miserable story of his mother’s unhappy existence on earth –
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke. No possibilities. It was all settled in advance.
is made quite out of the ordinary by Peter Handke’s almost-out-of-control almost-manic manner of writing. You might say this is not so much writing as very articulate shouting – “now, do you SEE what you DID?” this book is saying, over and over. This book also breaks the fourth wall and writes about its writing –
It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me.. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment.
Really the same spirit-crushing events happened to millions of working-class women during the 20th century, including my own mother (thankfully she had a nice non-alcoholic husband and didn’t have a nervous breakdown). Society’s rigid expectations of women were, it’s true, demolished for a time by World War Two but as soon as that was over women were herded back to the house and specifically the kitchen.
I’m not sure if I recommend this little book, it’s completely bleak, but it is a great feminist statement.
The very ordinary miserable story of his mother’s unhappy existence on earth –
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of young men -a girl's future was a joke. No possibilities. It was all settled in advance.
is made quite out of the ordinary by Peter Handke’s almost-out-of-control almost-manic manner of writing. You might say this is not so much writing as very articulate shouting – “now, do you SEE what you DID?” this book is saying, over and over. This book also breaks the fourth wall and writes about its writing –
It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupations with the story, the story has not ceased to preoccupy me.. Writing has not, as I at first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment.
Really the same spirit-crushing events happened to millions of working-class women during the 20th century, including my own mother (thankfully she had a nice non-alcoholic husband and didn’t have a nervous breakdown). Society’s rigid expectations of women were, it’s true, demolished for a time by World War Two but as soon as that was over women were herded back to the house and specifically the kitchen.
I’m not sure if I recommend this little book, it’s completely bleak, but it is a great feminist statement.
January 3, 2021
What does it mean to write about Death, not abstract death, or death of some invented Other, but Death in its most personal, intimate, self-shattering form? How, when the act of writing, of composition, is inherently distancing, can one write about that which is closest to us?
The relationship of Life to Death is that of Music to Silence; how can we write about the difference between the silence before a note, and the silence that follows?
The Death of the Mother. This is a hackneyed literary trope and a cliche-ridden mud-plain of endless, soggy, sticky narrative. To speak of it is to Quote. To Quote is to dissemble. To dissemble is to betray.
In this short novella, only 70 or so pages in length, Handke attempts to write about his mother in the weeks after her suicide. Tries and fails. And yet his failing is a masterpiece. It is a work of a writer attempting to control/delineate/contain the ending of this life, and not succeeding.
I urge you to set aside an hour or two one evening and read this in one, unbroken, sitting.
The relationship of Life to Death is that of Music to Silence; how can we write about the difference between the silence before a note, and the silence that follows?
The Death of the Mother. This is a hackneyed literary trope and a cliche-ridden mud-plain of endless, soggy, sticky narrative. To speak of it is to Quote. To Quote is to dissemble. To dissemble is to betray.
In this short novella, only 70 or so pages in length, Handke attempts to write about his mother in the weeks after her suicide. Tries and fails. And yet his failing is a masterpiece. It is a work of a writer attempting to control/delineate/contain the ending of this life, and not succeeding.
I urge you to set aside an hour or two one evening and read this in one, unbroken, sitting.
February 17, 2020
February 16, 2020 - the more I read of Handke, the more it seems that the death of his Slovenian mother is the key to the whole edifice. In addition to being a masterpiece in its own right, this book helps unlock the mysteries of Repetition and the Moravian Night. Clues to his strange and twisted politics are here as well.
***
She was; she became; she became nothing.
A teenage boy gives his mother the books he's been reading - novels by Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Faulkner - and she absorbs them with enthusiasm. For the first time in her life she learns to express herself in words. However,
Literature didn't teach her to start thinking of herself but showed her it was too late for that.
A gain in freedom, or even happiness, may ultimately leave you standing face to face with that thing you were successfully able to avoid for years.
This is one of the saddest books I've ever read.
***
She was; she became; she became nothing.
A teenage boy gives his mother the books he's been reading - novels by Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Faulkner - and she absorbs them with enthusiasm. For the first time in her life she learns to express herself in words. However,
Literature didn't teach her to start thinking of herself but showed her it was too late for that.
A gain in freedom, or even happiness, may ultimately leave you standing face to face with that thing you were successfully able to avoid for years.
This is one of the saddest books I've ever read.
April 5, 2021
چگونه میتوان در پناه ادبیات تمام لحظات فلاکتبار یک فرد را کسیکه به آن تعلق خاطر داری یا نداری را به تصویر کشید و وصف کرد؟
📖کتاب دربارهی مادریست که بجز چند جملهی کوتاه و دوران بیماری و سرخوردگیاش، خاطرهی دیگری برای فرزندش به جا نگذاشته و حالا با خبردار شدن از مرگ او فرزندش تصمیم به روایت داستان زندگیاش می کند. پسر با بیان تمام جزییات و توصیفات به استقبال مرگ مادر میرود و با دیدی تیزبینانه همهی حالات مادر را در شرایط مختلف و با اشراف به تمامی نکات ادبی و روایی و با لحنی شعرگونه توصیف میکند.
.
این حقیقت ندارد که نوشتن کمکم کرده است. ظرف هفتهها کلنجار رفتنهایم با داستان، داستان از کلنجار با من دست نکشیده است. نوشتن، همانطور که از اول فکرش را میکردم، یادآور دوران مختومهای از زندگیام نبود، بلکه صرفا در هیأت جملههایی که فقط در ادعا بیطرف بودند بیوقفه ادای یادآوری را درآورده بود.
📖کتاب دربارهی مادریست که بجز چند جملهی کوتاه و دوران بیماری و سرخوردگیاش، خاطرهی دیگری برای فرزندش به جا نگذاشته و حالا با خبردار شدن از مرگ او فرزندش تصمیم به روایت داستان زندگیاش می کند. پسر با بیان تمام جزییات و توصیفات به استقبال مرگ مادر میرود و با دیدی تیزبینانه همهی حالات مادر را در شرایط مختلف و با اشراف به تمامی نکات ادبی و روایی و با لحنی شعرگونه توصیف میکند.
.
این حقیقت ندارد که نوشتن کمکم کرده است. ظرف هفتهها کلنجار رفتنهایم با داستان، داستان از کلنجار با من دست نکشیده است. نوشتن، همانطور که از اول فکرش را میکردم، یادآور دوران مختومهای از زندگیام نبود، بلکه صرفا در هیأت جملههایی که فقط در ادعا بیطرف بودند بیوقفه ادای یادآوری را درآورده بود.
April 29, 2016
The half-lit room. The cream-colored paint on the walls reflecting barely enough light to see. The tiled floor, absent of dirt or dust. The cot which lies empty, barren and untouched. All of these circumstances, all of these facts can be taken as a symbol for the hurt, pain and utter emptiness Handke's mother felt as she grew to become, in her own words, nothing.
"And so she was nothing and never would be anything, it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast. She already said, "in my day," though she was not yet thirty. Until then, she resigned herself, but now life became so hard that for the first time she had to listen to reason. She listened to reason, but understood nothing."
As she raises a child and is married to a man that she doesn't love, being beaten habitually and for being the unfortunate gender of a woman, she felt nothing anymore. She would laugh while being hit, she would smile when she felt depressed and her inner turmoil while being resigned, was passionate.
Handke wrote this right after his mother's suicide and I can feel his love and angst and power within the pages as he struggles to know what to write, but eventually puts down raw emotion on paper, showing us who his mother was and why she did what she did, what was inevitable, what was needed.
"When I write, I necessarily write about the past, about something which, at least while I am writing, is behind me. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine. I am writing the story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about her and how she came to her death than any outside investigator who might, with the help of a religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the interpretation of dreams, arrive at a facile explanation of this interesting case of suicide, but second in my own interest, because having something to do brings me back to life, and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case."
The emphasis of capital letters for certain words makes the reader relate to what is being said, relate in a way that the sorrow is constantly in the foreground, never being forgotten, never being set aside.
This is her life in 100 pages. She was and now IS something, never to be nothing again.
"And so she was nothing and never would be anything, it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast. She already said, "in my day," though she was not yet thirty. Until then, she resigned herself, but now life became so hard that for the first time she had to listen to reason. She listened to reason, but understood nothing."
As she raises a child and is married to a man that she doesn't love, being beaten habitually and for being the unfortunate gender of a woman, she felt nothing anymore. She would laugh while being hit, she would smile when she felt depressed and her inner turmoil while being resigned, was passionate.
Handke wrote this right after his mother's suicide and I can feel his love and angst and power within the pages as he struggles to know what to write, but eventually puts down raw emotion on paper, showing us who his mother was and why she did what she did, what was inevitable, what was needed.
"When I write, I necessarily write about the past, about something which, at least while I am writing, is behind me. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine. I am writing the story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about her and how she came to her death than any outside investigator who might, with the help of a religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the interpretation of dreams, arrive at a facile explanation of this interesting case of suicide, but second in my own interest, because having something to do brings me back to life, and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case."
The emphasis of capital letters for certain words makes the reader relate to what is being said, relate in a way that the sorrow is constantly in the foreground, never being forgotten, never being set aside.
This is her life in 100 pages. She was and now IS something, never to be nothing again.
November 22, 2018
همین که کلمه فقر به میان می آید، همیشه به این فکر می کنم که یکی بود، یکی نبود! و تا حد زیادی هم آدم آن را از دهان کسانی می شوند که در گذشته به آن دچار بوده اند، کلمه ای متصل به کودکی. یعنی نه اینکه "من فقیر بودم"، بلکه "پدر و مادرم انسان های فقیری بودند". توضیح واضحاتی شترپلنگ به قصد رنگ و لعاب زدن به خاطرات. ولی اینجانب از گل و بوته زدن به خاطره هایم معذورم
چند هفته ای از خودکشی مادر می گذرد و حالا پسر قصد نوشتن چیزی شبیه زندگینامه (نه دقیقا) برای مادر را دارد: مبارزه نافرجام زنی فرسوده که روزگاری دختر روستایی سرکشی بوده. داستان روایت ماوقع نیست، بلکه بیشتر بیان احساسات و حالات مادر طی حوادث، روزمرگی ها و بدبختی هاست، تیره روزیهایی که در تمام جوامع، مختص زنان است و مثلا با این عبارات مشترک بیان می شود: فقط منتظرم بچه ها از آب و گل در بیان. اگر حین خواندن در غم زن شریک شوی، به روزهای مه گرفته اش کشیده می شوی و خواندن غم انگیز می شود و بس طاقت فرسا. راوی به گفته خودش تلاش بسیاری کرده که داستان پردازی را تا حد ممکن کنار بگذارد و و الحق که در این امر بسیار موفق بوده و حتی گاهی کارش به فلسفه بافی می کشد
عادت به تفکر بر حسب فایده و ضرر، این پلیدترین طرز نگاه به حیات، ارزش صوری اش را تباه می کند. همین که گفتند "هرچیزی فواید و مضرات خودش را دارد"، تحمل ناپذیر تحمل پذیر شد. ضرر محض و آنچه روی هم رفته در حکم ضرر است، چیزی نیست مگر ضمیمه ای ضروری بر هر فایده. فایده هم علیالقاعده در حکم غیاب ضرر است: نه سر و صدایی، نه مسئولیتی، بدون کار کردن برای دیگران، بدون خانه و بچه ها را به امان خدا ول کردن. ضررهایی که غایب بودند جبران آن هایی می شدند که حاضر بودند
ترجمه کمی می لنگد و این در کنار نثر بسیار عجیب و غریب کتاب، درک مفهوم جملات را مشکل می کند. توصیف های طویل گاهی در یکی دو کلمه خلاصه شده اند و حوادث عمده داستان در یکی دو جمله
خیال می کردم عنوان کتاب اشاره ای باشد به فرزند (راوی) اما اینطور نبود، تعبیر از غم بال در آوردن به مادر اشاره داشت و چه تعبیر زیبا و تلخی، برای مرگِ زنانی که همیشه مادرند، برای همه، حتی برای شوهرانشان
December 19, 2016
“My sense of horror makes me feel better: at last my boredom is gone; an unresisting body, no more exhausting distances, a painless passage of time,” Peter Handke writes in this distilling memoir about his mother. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is his attempt at reconciling with his mother’s suicide, his piecing together of the life she lived.
I didn’t intend on reading this book now, especially since I just finished Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell. However, as I arranged my books and thumbed through the first few pages of this short read, I was trapped. Cover to cover I read it, intrigued at how the narrator is able to keep immense distance from such a jarring subject, and yet still allow me to see the immediacy of his pain unfold through these pages. There are no scenes, no attempts at drama (and for a subject like this why should there be?); in fact in some sections there is just the confusion of hysteria. Handke’s pointed and illuminating prose makes this a captivating read and the beauty of this memoir is its ability to transcend subject and person, because
As immediate as the urge to read this was, the urge to start writing meditatively about it was perhaps even greater, hence these brief thoughts. Lately, books about mothers have filled my reading space: first Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love, Halo’s Not Even My Name: A True Story, and now this book. Reading them, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, a woman whom I consider an amalgam of all three protagonists, one who has endured many senseless acts, has lived through war, disease, famine, and still carries the pain with her; yet surprisingly, one who never ceases to care for people, even strangers, and one who never ceases to hope. But this is another thing Handke manages, for as he peels apart the layers of his mother’s life, he brings the reader closer to seeing the mother in his or her life.
I didn’t intend on reading this book now, especially since I just finished Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell. However, as I arranged my books and thumbed through the first few pages of this short read, I was trapped. Cover to cover I read it, intrigued at how the narrator is able to keep immense distance from such a jarring subject, and yet still allow me to see the immediacy of his pain unfold through these pages. There are no scenes, no attempts at drama (and for a subject like this why should there be?); in fact in some sections there is just the confusion of hysteria. Handke’s pointed and illuminating prose makes this a captivating read and the beauty of this memoir is its ability to transcend subject and person, because
merely to relate the vicissitudes of a life that came to a sudden end would be pure presumption.
The reader is left to gather the details of his mother's life and shape it into story What is usually depleted concerning the concept of pain, Handke replenishes by forcing the reader to face this simple horror made lucid through words:Mere existence had become a torture to her.
As immediate as the urge to read this was, the urge to start writing meditatively about it was perhaps even greater, hence these brief thoughts. Lately, books about mothers have filled my reading space: first Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love, Halo’s Not Even My Name: A True Story, and now this book. Reading them, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, a woman whom I consider an amalgam of all three protagonists, one who has endured many senseless acts, has lived through war, disease, famine, and still carries the pain with her; yet surprisingly, one who never ceases to care for people, even strangers, and one who never ceases to hope. But this is another thing Handke manages, for as he peels apart the layers of his mother’s life, he brings the reader closer to seeing the mother in his or her life.
February 29, 2020
Smrt je čudna.
Deluje nestvarno u životu, u fikciji deluje stvarnije.
Svako je imao takvo iskustvo – neko ko mu je zaista blizak, preminuo je i potrebno je dosta vremena da se to osvesti. Neke smrti se uvlače pod kožu i ne daju mira; najpre se čine jasnim pa postepeno opsedaju. Naročito kada je smrt nagla. Nekad čovek godinama ne može da otprati sebe u odnosu na gubitak nekog drugog. Ono što je ostalo iza nekoga uporno nas vraća toj osobi – od anegdota do sitnih predmeta o kojima ne razmišljamo. I ponekad pomislim kako nas samo jedan poziv deli, kao da će neko sutra da me pozove.
Svoje voljene nikad ne puštamo, niti oni puštaju nas. Svako sećanje produžetak je života, čitanje, reinterpretacija, novi odabir – ima tok i boli.
Tako se u mene nakon čitanja uvukla neka plima, ono što Handke naziva bezidejnom nesrećom. Narastajući osećaj malodušnosti, teško u reči uobličiv. Ako je sećanje na umrle njihov nastavak života, ovde je posredi obdukcija duše, svedočanstvo neosvešćenosti. U tom nevelikom broju strana smestila se neverovatna silina životne celine – ne toliko odnos majke i sina, koliko bogato predočavanje svega onoga što je majka mogla da predstavlja. Handke posredstvom razoružavajućih sećanja ide u same rubove našeg osećajnog bića dočaravajući ono između, ono što izmiče rečima. I polazi mu za rukom da kroz distancu dođe do duboko intimnog.
Čitanje je tako vraćanje u tu nemilo lebdeće stanje, koje nije ni žalost ni mir ni nespokoj ni tuga, a sve to zajedno.
Kada jednog dana budem naučio nemački (a ne, ko sad, samo da znam da brojim i da kažem Schildkröte i Schmetterling), voleo bih da osetim te rečenice u originalu.
Ko nije ništa čitao od Handkea, neka počne odavde.
Deluje nestvarno u životu, u fikciji deluje stvarnije.
Svako je imao takvo iskustvo – neko ko mu je zaista blizak, preminuo je i potrebno je dosta vremena da se to osvesti. Neke smrti se uvlače pod kožu i ne daju mira; najpre se čine jasnim pa postepeno opsedaju. Naročito kada je smrt nagla. Nekad čovek godinama ne može da otprati sebe u odnosu na gubitak nekog drugog. Ono što je ostalo iza nekoga uporno nas vraća toj osobi – od anegdota do sitnih predmeta o kojima ne razmišljamo. I ponekad pomislim kako nas samo jedan poziv deli, kao da će neko sutra da me pozove.
Svoje voljene nikad ne puštamo, niti oni puštaju nas. Svako sećanje produžetak je života, čitanje, reinterpretacija, novi odabir – ima tok i boli.
Tako se u mene nakon čitanja uvukla neka plima, ono što Handke naziva bezidejnom nesrećom. Narastajući osećaj malodušnosti, teško u reči uobličiv. Ako je sećanje na umrle njihov nastavak života, ovde je posredi obdukcija duše, svedočanstvo neosvešćenosti. U tom nevelikom broju strana smestila se neverovatna silina životne celine – ne toliko odnos majke i sina, koliko bogato predočavanje svega onoga što je majka mogla da predstavlja. Handke posredstvom razoružavajućih sećanja ide u same rubove našeg osećajnog bića dočaravajući ono između, ono što izmiče rečima. I polazi mu za rukom da kroz distancu dođe do duboko intimnog.
Čitanje je tako vraćanje u tu nemilo lebdeće stanje, koje nije ni žalost ni mir ni nespokoj ni tuga, a sve to zajedno.
Kada jednog dana budem naučio nemački (a ne, ko sad, samo da znam da brojim i da kažem Schildkröte i Schmetterling), voleo bih da osetim te rečenice u originalu.
Ko nije ništa čitao od Handkea, neka počne odavde.
June 25, 2024
این کتاب پس از چند روز از خودکشی مادر نویسنده به رشتهی تحریر در اومده و داستان زندگی مادر از زبان پسر رو بیان میکنه. نوشته از نظر من خیلی بی روح بود و ارتباط برقرار نکردم باهاش.ه
March 12, 2015
Peter Handke has written an elegy for his mother, a suicide, unlike anything I've read before. It is also the story of many women born in Austria between the World Wars, when life was not only difficult, it was hard, even more so for women than men. Opportunities were few, happinesses meager. Escape taken if possible but then came the Nazi era, the post-War years, varying levels of hardship, marriage, family, no aspirations.
He talks of the family and community into which she was born.
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in
itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no
need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at
our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms
of the young men; a girl's future was a joke....The girls
in our town used to play a game based on the stations in
a woman's life: Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead. (loc 92)
His mother did break free for a time, escaping to learn to cook. Then came Hitler, the war, fierce changes, the defeat of the Axis powers; poverty and hardship in Europe dictate Handke's mother's life in Berlin and return to Austria in the post-war years.
The author does discuss his methodology also:
These two dangers--the danger of merely telling
what happened and the danger of a human individual
becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences--
have slowed down my writing, because in every
sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is
true of every literary effort, but especially in
this case, where the facts are so overwhelming
that there is hardly anything to think out.
...I then adopted a new approach--starting not with
facts but with the already available formulations,
the linguistic deposit of man's social experience.
......
And because I cannot fully capture her in any sentence,
I keep having to start from scratch and never arrive
at the usual sharp and clear bird's-eye view. (loc 305)
And then he continues to have difficulty:
She refuses to be isolated and remains
unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness
and lie scattered on the paper. (loc 322)
This is ultimately a difficult book to read in spite of its brevity. The narrator avoids all sentiment and virtually all emotion and lets the reader unearth these things within the stark facts of a life lived.
Recommended to those readers who want to share in this hard experience that is so well presented in a very challenging manner. This book was originally written in 1972 after his mother's suicide in 1971.
He talks of the family and community into which she was born.
For a woman to be born into such surroundings was in
itself deadly. But perhaps there was one comfort: no
need to worry about the future. The fortune-tellers at
our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms
of the young men; a girl's future was a joke....The girls
in our town used to play a game based on the stations in
a woman's life: Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead. (loc 92)
His mother did break free for a time, escaping to learn to cook. Then came Hitler, the war, fierce changes, the defeat of the Axis powers; poverty and hardship in Europe dictate Handke's mother's life in Berlin and return to Austria in the post-war years.
The author does discuss his methodology also:
These two dangers--the danger of merely telling
what happened and the danger of a human individual
becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences--
have slowed down my writing, because in every
sentence I am afraid of losing my balance. This is
true of every literary effort, but especially in
this case, where the facts are so overwhelming
that there is hardly anything to think out.
...I then adopted a new approach--starting not with
facts but with the already available formulations,
the linguistic deposit of man's social experience.
......
And because I cannot fully capture her in any sentence,
I keep having to start from scratch and never arrive
at the usual sharp and clear bird's-eye view. (loc 305)
And then he continues to have difficulty:
She refuses to be isolated and remains
unfathomable; my sentences crash in the darkness
and lie scattered on the paper. (loc 322)
This is ultimately a difficult book to read in spite of its brevity. The narrator avoids all sentiment and virtually all emotion and lets the reader unearth these things within the stark facts of a life lived.
Recommended to those readers who want to share in this hard experience that is so well presented in a very challenging manner. This book was originally written in 1972 after his mother's suicide in 1971.
Read
August 25, 2024Writing, Barely Under Control
This is an astonishing book. I recommend getting an early-edition hardcover, because the dust flap has an affecting picture of Handke. He would have been thirty. He looks up with a helpless expression, his mouth slightly open. Bright lights reflect off his thick glasses. He has a sparse moustache and a Beatles haircut. He looks completely lost.
I don't think that photo is on the internet, but it's been painted (badly) for the cover of Three By Peter Handke, which you can see on this site.
Sorrow Beyond Dreams is about Handke's mother's suicide. As Maggie Nelson says when she recommends it in her own book The Red Parts, there's a window of time after a tragedy in which the pain can appear as writing. Write too soon, and the result will be opaque. Leave it too long, and it will be cold. Handke announces, sometimes succeeds, and repeatedly loses the sense of how his prose might work for a reader. By comparison The Red Parts, which has its own awareness of pain, is as clinical as In Cold Blood.
The first half of this book is about Handke's mother's family, beginning with her grandfather. It paints a picture of impoverished German Catholic life before and after the war. Poverty was "clean" (as opposed to "squalor," which was not common), orderly, and quiet (pp. 38-40).
"In this rural, Catholic environment, any suggestion that a woman might have a life of her own was a impertinence: disapproving looks, until shame, first acted out in fun, became real and frightened away the most elementary feelings. Even in joy, a 'woman's blush,' because joy was something to be ashamed of; in sadness, she turned red rather than pale and instead of bursting into tears broke out in sweat." [p. 20]
These often brilliant sociological observations are sometimes abstract or general, but then they veer back into the specific and personal. Some passages attribute attitudes to "people" (as in this quotation); others generalize ("no one had anything to say about himself," p. 33); some use the general or default masculine gender ("being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness," p. 26); others use the second-person pronoun ("this consolation... simply swallowed you up," p. 34): but from all these subject positions they fall, often suddenly, into Handke's mother's life:
"... You no longer had eyes for anything. 'Curiosity' ceased to be a human characteristic and became a womanish vice.
"But my mother was curious by nature and had no consoling fetishes..." [p. 34]
The sudden "my mother" produces a shock, because we've been invited to read "mother" in the "you" of the page leading up to this passage. It's as if the narrator's mind had wandered, for self-preservation, away from its subject. This veering between voices happens in Handke's other books, but then it appears as a poetic trope. Here it's evidence of the narrator's wounded sense of control.
These changes of register are parallel to the way that other family members slip in and out of the book. I'm not sure if a reader could reliably count how many siblings Handke had (it seems like three brothers and a sister), but the reason for that uncertainty is their wavering presence in the narrator's mind. Yet this isn't a narrative in which the son is close to the mother: sometimes the mother seems to be entirely by herself (p. 36), and there are only a few pages in which the son seems to be close to her.
About halfway through the book, a reader may begin to wonder when the sociological, religious, and economic observations will give way to the story of the mother's suicide. This starts to happen around p. 43.
On p. 49, the prose turns again, very suddenly. It is one of the most effective such moments I know in literature. This is the passage when everything sociological turns to everything psychological:
"And then the always identical objects all about her, in always the same places! She tried to be untidy, but her daily puttings-away had become too automatic. If only she could die! ... [p. 49]
Then the narrative moves away again, and the next page presents a list of physical symptoms the mother developed. It sounds at first as if Handke's mother died by suicide because she could not bear the symptoms of a neurological condition, but if that were to be true, why spend half the book desribing an ordinary unhappy life in a rural Catholic town? This question persists. On p. 55 she is diagnosed with a nervous breakdown, but it seems she may actually be suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's. The narrator doesn't decide the issue -- he doesn't even raise it -- and so the purpose of the book's first half remains unresolved.
There are also excellent passages on writing, in which the narrator pauses to assess what he is attempting to do. On p. 66, he says "It is not true that writing has helped me." A reader might expect that's because the writing isn't cathartic, or it opens more questions than it resolves, or it reopens wounds, or it fails to deepen undersanding -- but the reason writing hasn't helped is that the narrator still experiences night terrors. Terror is what writing is supposed to help: an amazing idea, which illuminates the relative calm of the first half of the book.
The world is full of memoirs and narratives of trauma, but I don't know any that try so hard to create suffering as writing.
Revised August 2024
This is an astonishing book. I recommend getting an early-edition hardcover, because the dust flap has an affecting picture of Handke. He would have been thirty. He looks up with a helpless expression, his mouth slightly open. Bright lights reflect off his thick glasses. He has a sparse moustache and a Beatles haircut. He looks completely lost.
I don't think that photo is on the internet, but it's been painted (badly) for the cover of Three By Peter Handke, which you can see on this site.
Sorrow Beyond Dreams is about Handke's mother's suicide. As Maggie Nelson says when she recommends it in her own book The Red Parts, there's a window of time after a tragedy in which the pain can appear as writing. Write too soon, and the result will be opaque. Leave it too long, and it will be cold. Handke announces, sometimes succeeds, and repeatedly loses the sense of how his prose might work for a reader. By comparison The Red Parts, which has its own awareness of pain, is as clinical as In Cold Blood.
The first half of this book is about Handke's mother's family, beginning with her grandfather. It paints a picture of impoverished German Catholic life before and after the war. Poverty was "clean" (as opposed to "squalor," which was not common), orderly, and quiet (pp. 38-40).
"In this rural, Catholic environment, any suggestion that a woman might have a life of her own was a impertinence: disapproving looks, until shame, first acted out in fun, became real and frightened away the most elementary feelings. Even in joy, a 'woman's blush,' because joy was something to be ashamed of; in sadness, she turned red rather than pale and instead of bursting into tears broke out in sweat." [p. 20]
These often brilliant sociological observations are sometimes abstract or general, but then they veer back into the specific and personal. Some passages attribute attitudes to "people" (as in this quotation); others generalize ("no one had anything to say about himself," p. 33); some use the general or default masculine gender ("being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness," p. 26); others use the second-person pronoun ("this consolation... simply swallowed you up," p. 34): but from all these subject positions they fall, often suddenly, into Handke's mother's life:
"... You no longer had eyes for anything. 'Curiosity' ceased to be a human characteristic and became a womanish vice.
"But my mother was curious by nature and had no consoling fetishes..." [p. 34]
The sudden "my mother" produces a shock, because we've been invited to read "mother" in the "you" of the page leading up to this passage. It's as if the narrator's mind had wandered, for self-preservation, away from its subject. This veering between voices happens in Handke's other books, but then it appears as a poetic trope. Here it's evidence of the narrator's wounded sense of control.
These changes of register are parallel to the way that other family members slip in and out of the book. I'm not sure if a reader could reliably count how many siblings Handke had (it seems like three brothers and a sister), but the reason for that uncertainty is their wavering presence in the narrator's mind. Yet this isn't a narrative in which the son is close to the mother: sometimes the mother seems to be entirely by herself (p. 36), and there are only a few pages in which the son seems to be close to her.
About halfway through the book, a reader may begin to wonder when the sociological, religious, and economic observations will give way to the story of the mother's suicide. This starts to happen around p. 43.
On p. 49, the prose turns again, very suddenly. It is one of the most effective such moments I know in literature. This is the passage when everything sociological turns to everything psychological:
"And then the always identical objects all about her, in always the same places! She tried to be untidy, but her daily puttings-away had become too automatic. If only she could die! ... [p. 49]
Then the narrative moves away again, and the next page presents a list of physical symptoms the mother developed. It sounds at first as if Handke's mother died by suicide because she could not bear the symptoms of a neurological condition, but if that were to be true, why spend half the book desribing an ordinary unhappy life in a rural Catholic town? This question persists. On p. 55 she is diagnosed with a nervous breakdown, but it seems she may actually be suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's. The narrator doesn't decide the issue -- he doesn't even raise it -- and so the purpose of the book's first half remains unresolved.
There are also excellent passages on writing, in which the narrator pauses to assess what he is attempting to do. On p. 66, he says "It is not true that writing has helped me." A reader might expect that's because the writing isn't cathartic, or it opens more questions than it resolves, or it reopens wounds, or it fails to deepen undersanding -- but the reason writing hasn't helped is that the narrator still experiences night terrors. Terror is what writing is supposed to help: an amazing idea, which illuminates the relative calm of the first half of the book.
The world is full of memoirs and narratives of trauma, but I don't know any that try so hard to create suffering as writing.
Revised August 2024
September 11, 2023
في الآونة الأخيرة زادت الجنازات حتى ما عاد للموت هيبته. كل يوم نقرأ في وسائل التواصل نعيا جديدا. بل كل ساعة. أمراض و زلازل و أوبئة و شيخوخة حتى تكاسلنا عن مواساة الناس إلا في أقرب الأقرباء. مات الإحساس بالرهبة أمام الحقيقة الوحيدة التي حازت إجماع البشر. الموت. إلا أن موت الأم ما زال يوجع القلب. ما أن أرى أحدا ينعي أمه حتى تتمزق نياط قلبي و تصير روحي أشلاء مبعثرة. مجرد التفكير في فقد الأم يجعلني أرتعد. ما زال للموت هيبته هنا و ما زالت رهبته ترجف القلوب.
الكاتب في هذه النوفيلا فقد أمه و عمرها إحدى و خمسون سنة بعد انتحارها بجرعة كبيرة من المسكنات و بعد معاناة مع المرض العضوي و النفسي و شقاء دائم في الحياة.
ولدت أمه في عشرينيات القرن الماضي و أمضت شبابها في ألمانيا النازية أثناء الحرب العالمية الثانية ثم عادت إلى النمسا بعد الحرب بفترة وجيزة و استقرت بها حتى قصفت عمرها بيديها.
يحكي لنا عن الفقر و الشقاء كما حكى لنا ساراماجو من قبل عن الفقر و الشقاء في سيرته الذاتية أيضا و كأن أوروبا القرن الماضي كانت تعيش واقعا أسوأ مما تعيشه أغلب الدول العربية الآن. كاد هذا أن يبث الأمل في نفسي لولا أن تذكرت مناظر المشردين الذين يفترشون الطرقات في العواصم الأوروبية و وجوه بائسة تمشي في شوارعها تنبىء بشظف العيش و صعوبات الحياة رغم الرفاهية التي تنعم بها الشوارع و الحانات و المناطق السياحية. لم أنخدع بمظاهر الحياة الكريمة التي نراها في أجهزة التلفاز و أتتني ومضة من الحكمة تقول بأن السعادة ليست فقط في النقود بل في إدراك الواقع و تقبله و التعايش معه و اقتناص السعادة من بين أنياب الحرمان و المعاناة.
النوفيلا القصيرة لغتها في منتهي التكثيف و كأنك تقرأ شعرا منثورا. لا كلمة زائدة و لا بهرجة لغوية و لا حشو. لغة راقية مسترسلة تكاد تخلو حتى من المشاعر. أما الترجمة فلابد أن تلفت ترجمة بسام حجار نظرك فقد استطاع أن يجعلك تشعر بترجمة سلسة انسيابية و كأن النص الأصلي مكتوبا بالعربية.
نوفيلا قصيرة لكاتب استحق العديد من الجوائز و على رأسها نوبل.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
كانت وساوس المذهب الكاثوليكي غريبة عنها. و لا تؤمن إلا بسعادة هنا على الأرض. إلا أن هذه السعادة لم تكن بدورها سوى فعل مصادفة. و بفعل المصادفة أصابها النحس.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
بات مجرد العيش أشبه بالتعذيب.
و لكن الموت أيضا كان يروعها.
October 25, 2023
Užas praznine jeste (ili bi mogao biti) osećaj (ali kakav?!) gubitka (ali kakvog?!)?
Sa druge (sic!) strane, reč je o onom osećaju koji vodi ka spoznaji da je egzistencija promašena, da ne može ništa više da ti pruži, odnosno da je jedino rešenje iz nje dostojanstveno istupiti. U tom smislu, pripovedačeva majka se (pro)nalazi u procepu između čekića postojanja shvaćenog kao tegobe i praznine (lišenosti, osujećenosti, alijenacije, samstvovanja,...) i nakovnja smrti shvaćene kao užasa. U tome je (možda?!) srž njene "bezželjne nesreće". Za početak, dakle, narativizuje se iskustvo: svoje, o odlasku majke; i tuđe, o njenom životu. Kojim god redom da se krenulo.
Sa prve strane, međutim, opstojava užas onoga koji je "blizu" i koga je napustio neko ko mu je blizak. Artikulacija mišljenog i artikulacija osećajnog i tada su neprekoračivi - što bi trebalo da znamo iz vlastite perspektive - iako nas se, paradoksalno, samo smrt drugih i može ticati, kao što će se naša sopstvena ticati svih drugih, osim nas samih. Baš zato se na prvim stranicama vizuelizuje ruka koja na pisaćoj mašini kucka samo po jednoj tipci ili autofikcionalno ja jasno izražava stav da je situacija/osećaj u kome se nalazi nesaopštiva, budući najdublje lična i posebna. U takvom vakuumu može se SAMO BITI i, nažalost ili na sreću, ništa više od toga.
Sa naše strane, stoga, nalazi se bližnji, ovde aktuelizovan kao pisac, (jer se narativ nesporno i pored svega mora čitati/ispisivati kao autobiografski zapis!) raspet između užasne potrebe za saopštavanjem i krajnje onemelosti pred prazninom. Svojevrstan hod po tankoj žici. A pisac je, svakako, osvešćen - ponekad i metafikcionalno - o tome šta proizvodi gubitak ravnoteže ili (verovatno bolje rečeno) osvrtanje unazad po svom gubitku. Da, delom bi ovde mogao biti utkan orfejski mit, i to kroz divljenja vredan pokušaj da se odistinski rekreira tuđa smrt/minuli život drugog putem pisanog, premda je evidentno da su u pomoć prizvani dokumenti (novinski članak, fotografije, pisma i oporuku), nedovoljni. Kao da umetnina svake biografije ne potiče iz subjektivnosti biografa (ili bar ne samo odatle), veći i u esencijalnoj nedostatnosti faktografskog. No,...
Osećaj/saznanje potom treba izneti na videlo, rasuti po praznini papira, a da se, pri tome, biografski narativ - jer Handkeovo minimafilično delo je zaista hrabro rvanje sa majčinim životom uz istovremeno poniranje dalje niz sopstveni rodoslov - ne zatre u hladnoći susprezane emotivnosti (beskompromisan je Handke i prema sebi i prema majci) i krutosti činjeničnog (što u sebi, skriva i brutalnost i banalnost) ili skrši kroz uvek moguću patvorenost izražajnog, onaj "književni ritual u kojem život pojedinca dejstvuje još samo kao povod." Takav poduhvat pretežak je - bolje reći neostvariv ab ovo - pa i za Pisca renomea kakav ima Handke, baš zato što je neostvariv i za bilo kog drugog. A to je, neporecivo, "bezželjna nesreća" svakog istinskog umetnika ponaosob. U zjapu koji počiva između suvo(parno)g prepričavanja činjenica i bezbolnog utapanja gubitka u estetizaciji krije se veličanstveni pad umetnika, svesnog da ostaje zagrcnut u manjkavosti jezika i metoda, i da, najposle, mora da zastane. Jer, o onome o čemu ne može da se govori, valja da se (za)ćuti. Kako nas o tome, lažući sebe dok napušta narativ, ironično obaveštava pisac: "Kasnije ću pokušati da se o tome tačnije izrazim." , da se, potom, ovoj problematici, koliko (mi) je poznato, nikada više ne vrati.
Shodno tome, kako god da je prevedena: "Užas praznine" ili "Bezželjna nesreća", ovo je knjiga o bolnim iskustvima. Najbolnijim (za umetnika). O smrti najbliž(nj)eg i o nemogućnosti da se tome pristupi - bez obzira na to koliko pokušavali sami sebe da ugrebemo na papir - a naposletku i o nemogućnosti da se ikada bude zadovoljan(?!), i pokušanim i postignutim. Prvo nas čini ljudima, a ovo poslednje Piscem.
Sa druge (sic!) strane, reč je o onom osećaju koji vodi ka spoznaji da je egzistencija promašena, da ne može ništa više da ti pruži, odnosno da je jedino rešenje iz nje dostojanstveno istupiti. U tom smislu, pripovedačeva majka se (pro)nalazi u procepu između čekića postojanja shvaćenog kao tegobe i praznine (lišenosti, osujećenosti, alijenacije, samstvovanja,...) i nakovnja smrti shvaćene kao užasa. U tome je (možda?!) srž njene "bezželjne nesreće". Za početak, dakle, narativizuje se iskustvo: svoje, o odlasku majke; i tuđe, o njenom životu. Kojim god redom da se krenulo.
Sa prve strane, međutim, opstojava užas onoga koji je "blizu" i koga je napustio neko ko mu je blizak. Artikulacija mišljenog i artikulacija osećajnog i tada su neprekoračivi - što bi trebalo da znamo iz vlastite perspektive - iako nas se, paradoksalno, samo smrt drugih i može ticati, kao što će se naša sopstvena ticati svih drugih, osim nas samih. Baš zato se na prvim stranicama vizuelizuje ruka koja na pisaćoj mašini kucka samo po jednoj tipci ili autofikcionalno ja jasno izražava stav da je situacija/osećaj u kome se nalazi nesaopštiva, budući najdublje lična i posebna. U takvom vakuumu može se SAMO BITI i, nažalost ili na sreću, ništa više od toga.
Sa naše strane, stoga, nalazi se bližnji, ovde aktuelizovan kao pisac, (jer se narativ nesporno i pored svega mora čitati/ispisivati kao autobiografski zapis!) raspet između užasne potrebe za saopštavanjem i krajnje onemelosti pred prazninom. Svojevrstan hod po tankoj žici. A pisac je, svakako, osvešćen - ponekad i metafikcionalno - o tome šta proizvodi gubitak ravnoteže ili (verovatno bolje rečeno) osvrtanje unazad po svom gubitku. Da, delom bi ovde mogao biti utkan orfejski mit, i to kroz divljenja vredan pokušaj da se odistinski rekreira tuđa smrt/minuli život drugog putem pisanog, premda je evidentno da su u pomoć prizvani dokumenti (novinski članak, fotografije, pisma i oporuku), nedovoljni. Kao da umetnina svake biografije ne potiče iz subjektivnosti biografa (ili bar ne samo odatle), veći i u esencijalnoj nedostatnosti faktografskog. No,...
Osećaj/saznanje potom treba izneti na videlo, rasuti po praznini papira, a da se, pri tome, biografski narativ - jer Handkeovo minimafilično delo je zaista hrabro rvanje sa majčinim životom uz istovremeno poniranje dalje niz sopstveni rodoslov - ne zatre u hladnoći susprezane emotivnosti (beskompromisan je Handke i prema sebi i prema majci) i krutosti činjeničnog (što u sebi, skriva i brutalnost i banalnost) ili skrši kroz uvek moguću patvorenost izražajnog, onaj "književni ritual u kojem život pojedinca dejstvuje još samo kao povod." Takav poduhvat pretežak je - bolje reći neostvariv ab ovo - pa i za Pisca renomea kakav ima Handke, baš zato što je neostvariv i za bilo kog drugog. A to je, neporecivo, "bezželjna nesreća" svakog istinskog umetnika ponaosob. U zjapu koji počiva između suvo(parno)g prepričavanja činjenica i bezbolnog utapanja gubitka u estetizaciji krije se veličanstveni pad umetnika, svesnog da ostaje zagrcnut u manjkavosti jezika i metoda, i da, najposle, mora da zastane. Jer, o onome o čemu ne može da se govori, valja da se (za)ćuti. Kako nas o tome, lažući sebe dok napušta narativ, ironično obaveštava pisac: "Kasnije ću pokušati da se o tome tačnije izrazim." , da se, potom, ovoj problematici, koliko (mi) je poznato, nikada više ne vrati.
Shodno tome, kako god da je prevedena: "Užas praznine" ili "Bezželjna nesreća", ovo je knjiga o bolnim iskustvima. Najbolnijim (za umetnika). O smrti najbliž(nj)eg i o nemogućnosti da se tome pristupi - bez obzira na to koliko pokušavali sami sebe da ugrebemo na papir - a naposletku i o nemogućnosti da se ikada bude zadovoljan(?!), i pokušanim i postignutim. Prvo nas čini ljudima, a ovo poslednje Piscem.
September 11, 2016
Barely remembered reading this in 1996, back when I read everything Handke had published. Read a yellowed mass market paperback with a cartoon image of the author on the cover (Three by Peter Handke). Reread the novella in this snazzy < 75 pg. standalone edition -- for what felt like the first time really -- because Knausgaard recently mentioned it as a major influence. This straightforward yet essentially scene-less "life story" about Handke's mother's suicide gave Knausgaard a blueprint for how to write about his father's slow suicide by alcohol. ("My painful memory of her daily motions, especially in the kitchen.") Otherwise, I love Handke's prose and unpredictable movement. Loved the dissolution at the end into a string of memories, observations, quotations, statements as in The Weight of the World (an all-time favorite). He mentions going slowly so he doesn't lose his balance and maybe that's what I love about the prose and approach -- it tightropes across a crack in the cement, with the sense that if he missteps what seems solid beneath his feet will give out and reveal itself as a long way down through empty air. Like growing up after WWII in Austria, his mother's slow dissolution and suicide is internalized, it's something that he is, his being, an inheritance that doesn't express itself as a hyberbolic lie. Also great stuff early on about poverty, National Socialism, penny-pinching, restraint, true love, the walls closing in a little by little, more and more, over time. All of which might sound like dire reading, but it's really an "enjoyable" quick read. "Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail."
April 10, 2024
4,5⭐️
Toller Stil und Sprache: verknappt, präzise, nüchtern, distanziert mit Brüchen. Er erzeugt eine hohe Dichte, die über kurze Absätze, große Zeiträume fasst.
Details, Alltagsbanalitäten ziehen mitten rein und emotionalisieren die Situation.
Sein Stil transportiert die Ambivalenz menschlicher Beziehungen auf spannungsgeladene Weise- objektiviert, analytisch und dennoch nah, berührend.
Symbolik und Metaphorik stehen nur durch ein speziell gewähltes Wort im Raum und setzen die Gedankenspirale in Gang.
Gegen Ende verliert er ein wenig die Konzentration. Es fällt ihm selber auf.
Handke ist einer der zeigt, mit wie wenig Beiwerk literarische Räume geöffnet werden können, wenn man sein Handwerk versteht.
Toller Stil und Sprache: verknappt, präzise, nüchtern, distanziert mit Brüchen. Er erzeugt eine hohe Dichte, die über kurze Absätze, große Zeiträume fasst.
Details, Alltagsbanalitäten ziehen mitten rein und emotionalisieren die Situation.
Sein Stil transportiert die Ambivalenz menschlicher Beziehungen auf spannungsgeladene Weise- objektiviert, analytisch und dennoch nah, berührend.
Symbolik und Metaphorik stehen nur durch ein speziell gewähltes Wort im Raum und setzen die Gedankenspirale in Gang.
Gegen Ende verliert er ein wenig die Konzentration. Es fällt ihm selber auf.
Handke ist einer der zeigt, mit wie wenig Beiwerk literarische Räume geöffnet werden können, wenn man sein Handwerk versteht.
October 17, 2023
Peter Handke কে বলা হয় দ্বিতীয় বিশ্ব যুদ্ধের পর সবচেয়ে প্রভাবশালী ইউরোপিয়ান লেখক। সাহিত্যে ' ভাষাগত দক্ষতার সাথে মানুষের অভিজ্ঞতার পরিধি ও সুনির্দিষ্টতা অন্বেষণ ' এর জন্য তাঁকে ২০১৯ সালে নোবেল পুরস্কার দেওয়া হয়। যদিও এতে খুব আপত্তির সৃষ্টি হয়েছিলো তাঁর রাজনৈতিক বক্তব্য আর কর্মকাণ্ডের জন্য। এসব কাহিনী যেহেতু জানিনা, তাতে মাথা ঘামাচ্ছিনা। তবে এটা ঠিকই বলতে হবে যে পিটার সাহেবের গদ্য বা লেখনশৈলী মনে বেশ চাপ সৃষ্টি করবার মতো, অন্তত তাঁর সবচেয়ে বিখ্যাত বইটির ক্ষেত্রে তা সত্য। নিজ জননীর আত্মহত্যার পর এই আত্মজীবনীমূলক উপন্যাসখানা তিনি লিখেন। পিটার সাহেবের নিজের আত্মজীবনী না ঠিক,বইটি তাঁর মায়ের জীবন নিয়ে লেখা। দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধের সময়কালে জার্মানের কোন এক গণ্ডগ্রামে জন্ম নেওয়া একজন নারীর গল্প।হয়তো তেমন ঘটনাবহুল বিশিষ্টতা সেই নারীর জীবনের নেই কিন্তু কোন ঘটনা ছাড়া কি একজন নারী ঘুমের ঔষধ গিলে মরে পড়ে থাকে?
বইটি বেশ ডিপ্রেসিভ আর অদ্ভুত নিরাসক্ত ভাষায় লেখা। বইটির শেষ প্যারাগ্রাফটি হলো-
"Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on air.
Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail."
তিনি পরে লিখেছেন কিনা জানিনা, জানার জন্য হয়তো উনার আরো বই পড়তে পারি।
বইটি বেশ ডিপ্রেসিভ আর অদ্ভুত নিরাসক্ত ভাষায় লেখা। বইটির শেষ প্যারাগ্রাফটি হলো-
"Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on air.
Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail."
তিনি পরে লিখেছেন কিনা জানিনা, জানার জন্য হয়তো উনার আরো বই পড়তে পারি।
May 21, 2016
عمل أدبي إنساني مختلف، هادئ، رغم مأساوية حادثة انتحار والدة الكاتب التي عشنا معها في العمل مختلف تقلبات حياتها منذ ولادتها إلى رحيلها عن الحياة.
العمل في بعض أجزائه مكتوب بلغة بسيطة، وفي أجزاء أخرى بلغة عميقة.
الترجمة جميلة جداً.. وهذا العمل هو الثاني الذي أقرأه للمؤلف، وسأعمل على قراءة بقية أعماله المترجمة للعربية.
بشكل عام، هذا الكتاب يستحق القراءة
العمل في بعض أجزائه مكتوب بلغة بسيطة، وفي أجزاء أخرى بلغة عميقة.
الترجمة جميلة جداً.. وهذا العمل هو الثاني الذي أقرأه للمؤلف، وسأعمل على قراءة بقية أعماله المترجمة للعربية.
بشكل عام، هذا الكتاب يستحق القراءة
January 26, 2021
Bez naročitog povoda – osim podsvesne želje da ostanem što dalje od sve one pompe – ne pročitavši ni retka pro i conta, Handkea sam ocenila verovatno dosadnim tipom, verovatno više zainteresovanim za neki štatijaznam aktivizam nego za književnost. Stotinak strana je malo za neki čvršći stav, no, ovakvih stotinak strana je više nego dovoljno za priznanje da mi je procena bila veoma loša.
Ovo što je hteo da uradi se radi baš ovako: ni slova gore, ni slova dole.
Ovo što je hteo da uradi se radi baš ovako: ni slova gore, ni slova dole.
July 13, 2021
چقدر خوبه قبل مردن برای کسانی که دوستشان داریم، نامه بنویسیم...
در این کتاب از زنی خواندم که ناچار بود قوی باشد و حس تنهایی از پا در آوردش.
یه جایی در وصف شوهرش گفته: "شوهرم پنج روز اینجا بود و ما هیچ حرفی نداشتیم به هم بزنیم. وقتی سر صحبت را باز میکنم، نمیفهمد منظورم چیست و بعدش دیگر ترجیح میدهم چیزی نگویم." خیلی این حال غمانگیزه 😔
داستانی خوب، با ترجمهای بد!
یه جاهایی اصلا جملهبندی ها رو درک نمیکردم...
در این کتاب از زنی خواندم که ناچار بود قوی باشد و حس تنهایی از پا در آوردش.
یه جایی در وصف شوهرش گفته: "شوهرم پنج روز اینجا بود و ما هیچ حرفی نداشتیم به هم بزنیم. وقتی سر صحبت را باز میکنم، نمیفهمد منظورم چیست و بعدش دیگر ترجیح میدهم چیزی نگویم." خیلی این حال غمانگیزه 😔
داستانی خوب، با ترجمهای بد!
یه جاهایی اصلا جملهبندی ها رو درک نمیکردم...
November 14, 2019
Овај кратки роман/новела је заправо Хандкеов полу-аутобиографски запис о самоубиству мајке и њеном животу.
Хандке је шкрт на речима и на описима. Живот мајке се описује хладнокрвно, фактографски, готово без икакве емоције која би то обојила (све време ми је у глави био почетак Странца са својом чувеном уводном реченицом). Та шкртост израза заправо врло добро ствара атмосферу тескобе и сивила, ужасне празнине којом је њена егзистенција била обојена. У позадини се наслућују и историјска превирања, спомињу се само у једној-две речи или реченици, што је такође сасвим довољно да се пред собом има слика читавог тог доба. Ипак, не могу се отети утиску да је дело могло бити дуже, мада је и овако реч о сјајној новели. На крају, 4,5*.
Хандке је шкрт на речима и на описима. Живот мајке се описује хладнокрвно, фактографски, готово без икакве емоције која би то обојила (све време ми је у глави био почетак Странца са својом чувеном уводном реченицом). Та шкртост израза заправо врло добро ствара атмосферу тескобе и сивила, ужасне празнине којом је њена егзистенција била обојена. У позадини се наслућују и историјска превирања, спомињу се само у једној-две речи или реченици, што је такође сасвим довољно да се пред собом има слика читавог тог доба. Ипак, не могу се отети утиску да је дело могло бити дуже, мада је и овако реч о сјајној новели. На крају, 4,5*.
June 14, 2020
It would be very difficult to write anything about this book without spoiling it for anyone who wants to read it.
December 9, 2022
هر چیزی سود و زیان خودش را دارد. به محض اینکه این جمله بیان میشود، تمام موارد تحمل ناپذیر، قابل تحمل میشوند.
شاید این کتاب همه فاکتورهایی که یک کتا�� افتضاح باید داشته باشه رو داشت ولی با اینحال منو تحت تاثیر قرار داد. چون راجع به مرگ بود. چند سالی هست که مثل کسی که از کندن زخمش و جاری شدن دوباره خون لذت میبره، از خوندن راجع به مرگ لذت میبرم. مثل کشتی که در لبه یک گرداب قرار گرفته باشه، ذهنم از دایرهی مرگ خارج نمیشه. میچرخم و میچرخم. ولی بازم خوبه که هست. بگذریم.
کتاب در اصل ادای دینی هست توسط نویسنده به مادر مرحومش که در حدود پنجاه سالگی خودکشی میکنه. رفتاری که بلاشک حاکی از حجم خشونتها و ناملایماتی بوده که بر این زن طی زندگی رفته. عمری که تباه شده. جوونی که تلف شده. آرزوهایی که پژمرده شده. و بچههایی که حالا همه رفتن. دردهایی که تو سینه میمونه و کسی ازش خبردار نمیشه. وقتی چروکها رو توی آینه میبینی و میفهمی که فرصتی برای جبران نیست. دلت سنگین میشه و شاید قطره اشکی هم از گوشه چشمت بیاد. شاید اینطوری میشه که یک آدم توی پنجاه سالگی تصمیم میگیره خودکشی کنه. شاید حس میکنه که بهتره دیگه سکان کشتی رو رها کنه. شاید دیگه توانی توی وجودش نمونده. شایدم فکر کرده که دیگه ارزشش رو نداره.
کلا بخوام بگم، کتاب خط داستانی خاصی نداره و اگرچه در فرم ابداعاتی داشت که نظرم رو بعضا جلب میکرد ولی کلا اونطور نیست که به کسی توصیه بکنمش. بنظرم بیشتر مناسب کسایی هست که یا توی احوال کتاب باشن یا توجهشون خیلی روی فرم نویسندگی باشه. خلاصه چندان خواندنی نیست.
شاید این کتاب همه فاکتورهایی که یک کتا�� افتضاح باید داشته باشه رو داشت ولی با اینحال منو تحت تاثیر قرار داد. چون راجع به مرگ بود. چند سالی هست که مثل کسی که از کندن زخمش و جاری شدن دوباره خون لذت میبره، از خوندن راجع به مرگ لذت میبرم. مثل کشتی که در لبه یک گرداب قرار گرفته باشه، ذهنم از دایرهی مرگ خارج نمیشه. میچرخم و میچرخم. ولی بازم خوبه که هست. بگذریم.
کتاب در اصل ادای دینی هست توسط نویسنده به مادر مرحومش که در حدود پنجاه سالگی خودکشی میکنه. رفتاری که بلاشک حاکی از حجم خشونتها و ناملایماتی بوده که بر این زن طی زندگی رفته. عمری که تباه شده. جوونی که تلف شده. آرزوهایی که پژمرده شده. و بچههایی که حالا همه رفتن. دردهایی که تو سینه میمونه و کسی ازش خبردار نمیشه. وقتی چروکها رو توی آینه میبینی و میفهمی که فرصتی برای جبران نیست. دلت سنگین میشه و شاید قطره اشکی هم از گوشه چشمت بیاد. شاید اینطوری میشه که یک آدم توی پنجاه سالگی تصمیم میگیره خودکشی کنه. شاید حس میکنه که بهتره دیگه سکان کشتی رو رها کنه. شاید دیگه توانی توی وجودش نمونده. شایدم فکر کرده که دیگه ارزشش رو نداره.
کلا بخوام بگم، کتاب خط داستانی خاصی نداره و اگرچه در فرم ابداعاتی داشت که نظرم رو بعضا جلب میکرد ولی کلا اونطور نیست که به کسی توصیه بکنمش. بنظرم بیشتر مناسب کسایی هست که یا توی احوال کتاب باشن یا توجهشون خیلی روی فرم نویسندگی باشه. خلاصه چندان خواندنی نیست.
April 9, 2022
روایت هاندکه از خودکشی مادرش؛
با لحنی تلخ، عبوس و سرد. با فاصلهگذاری عامدانه تا خواننده را به شخصیت مادر گاهی نزدیک و گاهی دور کند، تا تصویری کامل از چهره مادر ساخته نشود، تا مرهمی برای زخم عمیق نویسنده باشد هر چند که این آخری به زعم خود نویسنده با نوشتن محقق نشد.
ترجمه کتاب در بعضی قسمتها به شکل واضحی ایراد دارد و عبارات و جملات گنگ و نامفهوم است و لذت خواندن اثر را کم میکند.
از کتاب، جملات و پاراگرافهای زیاد و درخشانی برداشتم اما این یکی را از همه بیشتر دوست داشتم.
"این حقیقت ندارد که نوشتن فایدهای برایم در بر داشت. در آن هفتههایی که به داستان پرداختم، داستان هم دست نمیکشید از پرداختن به من. نوشتن آنگونه که در آغاز باور داشتم، خاطرهای نبود از مرحلهای بهپایانرسیده از زندگیام بلکه فقط گرته مداومی بود از خاطره به شکل جملههایی که تنها مدعی دور شدن از من بودند. هنوز هم شبها یکمرتبه بیدار میشوم، گویی تلنگری آرام در درون از خوابم میپراند و میبینم که چگونه با نفسی نگهداشتهشده از فرط دهشت، ثانیه به ثانیه جان و دلم میپوسد. هوا در تاریکی آنچنان بیحرکت میایستد که در چشم من تمام اشیا تعادلشان را از دست میدهند و به نظر میرسد کنده شدهاند. اشیا بدون هیچ گرانیگاهی بیصدا اندکی میچرخند و سرانجام بلافاصله از همه جا سقوط و خفهام میکنند."
صفحه ۷۵ و ۷۶
با لحنی تلخ، عبوس و سرد. با فاصلهگذاری عامدانه تا خواننده را به شخصیت مادر گاهی نزدیک و گاهی دور کند، تا تصویری کامل از چهره مادر ساخته نشود، تا مرهمی برای زخم عمیق نویسنده باشد هر چند که این آخری به زعم خود نویسنده با نوشتن محقق نشد.
ترجمه کتاب در بعضی قسمتها به شکل واضحی ایراد دارد و عبارات و جملات گنگ و نامفهوم است و لذت خواندن اثر را کم میکند.
از کتاب، جملات و پاراگرافهای زیاد و درخشانی برداشتم اما این یکی را از همه بیشتر دوست داشتم.
"این حقیقت ندارد که نوشتن فایدهای برایم در بر داشت. در آن هفتههایی که به داستان پرداختم، داستان هم دست نمیکشید از پرداختن به من. نوشتن آنگونه که در آغاز باور داشتم، خاطرهای نبود از مرحلهای بهپایانرسیده از زندگیام بلکه فقط گرته مداومی بود از خاطره به شکل جملههایی که تنها مدعی دور شدن از من بودند. هنوز هم شبها یکمرتبه بیدار میشوم، گویی تلنگری آرام در درون از خوابم میپراند و میبینم که چگونه با نفسی نگهداشتهشده از فرط دهشت، ثانیه به ثانیه جان و دلم میپوسد. هوا در تاریکی آنچنان بیحرکت میایستد که در چشم من تمام اشیا تعادلشان را از دست میدهند و به نظر میرسد کنده شدهاند. اشیا بدون هیچ گرانیگاهی بیصدا اندکی میچرخند و سرانجام بلافاصله از همه جا سقوط و خفهام میکنند."
صفحه ۷۵ و ۷۶
August 6, 2020
Posle " Velikog pada " koji mi se nikako nije dopao, rešila sam da ipak Handkeu pružim šansu i nisam se pokajala. Ovaj njegov roman mi se mnogo više dopao. Jasno napisan, bez nepotrebnih metafora i skrivenog značenja. Roman je inače o životu i samoubistvu Handkeove majke. Nimalo veselo štivo, ali odlično napisano.
May 24, 2021
Most of the Nobel laureates that I have read have this precise way of getting to the bottom of a mundane experience that brings you to tears. Handke is no different, although the events depicted in the book are anything but mundane. In short (and without spoiling anything), the narrator is writing the book as a reflection on his mother’s life, who has just passed away. His look back on her joys and struggles was at times so depressing that I found myself needing a breather, though this was a 2-3 hour read at most. When the cultivation of empathy is mentioned in the same breath as literature, this book should be pointed to as a prime example. I find it hard to believe that it is possible to read A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and not radiate some form of loving energy toward those around you who may resemble the main character of this book in shape or spirit. Give it a go.
April 1, 2024
Peter Handkes Wunschloses Unglück erzählt die Lebensgeschichte seiner Mutter, die sich 51-jährig mit Schlaftabletten und Beruhigungsmitteln das Leben genommen hatte.
Der Text dokumentiert, wie sich während ihres Lebens die Persönlichkeit der Mutter und während des Schreibens das Verständnis des Sohnes für sie entwickelt.
Wie auch bei Eribon erfahren wir etwas über eine Frau, die im sozialen Umfeld der Arbeiterklasse aufwuchs, von einem verheirateten Mann schwanger wird und später mit einem Mann, den sie verabscheute, weitere Kinder hatte. Sie kämpft um ihre Würde und dafür, dass es ihren Kindern einmal besser geht. Unter der Last der täglichen Probleme erkrankt sie an ihrer Seele – mit massivem körperlichem Leiden. Nach jahrelanger Krankheit ohne Aussicht auf Besserung beschließt sie, sich das Leben zu nehmen. Allen ihren Angehörigen schreibt sie Abschiedsbriefe. Als Handke auf die Nachricht vom Tod seiner Mutter nach Österreich fliegt, ist er außer sich vor Stolz, dass sie Selbstmord begangen hatte.
Anders als die Mutter bei Didier Eribon und der Vater bei Sabine Peters war Handkes Mutter in der Lage selbstbestimmt eine Entscheidung für ihre Zukunft zu treffen.
Der Text dokumentiert, wie sich während ihres Lebens die Persönlichkeit der Mutter und während des Schreibens das Verständnis des Sohnes für sie entwickelt.
Wie auch bei Eribon erfahren wir etwas über eine Frau, die im sozialen Umfeld der Arbeiterklasse aufwuchs, von einem verheirateten Mann schwanger wird und später mit einem Mann, den sie verabscheute, weitere Kinder hatte. Sie kämpft um ihre Würde und dafür, dass es ihren Kindern einmal besser geht. Unter der Last der täglichen Probleme erkrankt sie an ihrer Seele – mit massivem körperlichem Leiden. Nach jahrelanger Krankheit ohne Aussicht auf Besserung beschließt sie, sich das Leben zu nehmen. Allen ihren Angehörigen schreibt sie Abschiedsbriefe. Als Handke auf die Nachricht vom Tod seiner Mutter nach Österreich fliegt, ist er außer sich vor Stolz, dass sie Selbstmord begangen hatte.
Anders als die Mutter bei Didier Eribon und der Vater bei Sabine Peters war Handkes Mutter in der Lage selbstbestimmt eine Entscheidung für ihre Zukunft zu treffen.
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