A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother took an overdose of sleeping pills in the Carinthian village she was born in, Handke sits down to set out her life: a Slovene-speaking rural girlhood with no schooling permitted, a wartime affair, a marriage of convenience, poverty, and a body worn out by work and by having nowhere to put an ambition. He keeps breaking off to distrust his own sentences, watching the ready-made biographical formulas smooth her into a type of woman rather than a person. It stands as a founding text of the postwar German-language memoir and doubles as an argument about what narration does to a life.
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