A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Masterplots II: World Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Peter Handke
- First Published: 1972
- Type of Work: Philosophical realism
- Time of Work: The early 1920’s to the early 1970’s
- Setting: A small Austrian village, Berlin, and Frankfurt
- Principal Characters: The Narrator, His Mother
- Genres: Long fiction, Philosophical realism
- Subjects: Mothers, Parents and children, Suicide, Twentieth century, Women’s issues, Death or dying, Austria or Austrians, Germany or German people, Women’s rights, Berlin
- Locales: Berlin, Germany, Austria, Frankfurt, Germany
The Novel
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the story of the life and death of Peter Handke’s mother, can be considered a novel in the sense that all biography and autobiography verge upon fiction when the writer imposes a pattern of meaning upon the facts. Handke recognizes a conflict when he tells the reader that “in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts,” and he fears reducing his mother’s story to a mere “literary ritual.” At the same time, he sees that readers other than himself will want to move beyond his mother’s specific case to...
[The entire page is 2311 words long]
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