A Sorrow Beyond Dreams in NYRB Classics

Oct 26, 2009 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: translation, death, love-the-cover, bio-diary-memoir, read-in-2010, nyrb, german-ic-y, under-200-pages

NYRB not only has an amazing selection of books, but their cover design is invariably gorgeous, and in a few cases even seems reason enough to buy some of their titles. I loved the cover of Stoner and The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story and Novels in Three Lines, but the stark beauty of "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" so far tops them all.

The book is a memoir of another sad little round of life, and the cover, a photograph by James Casebere called "A Barrel Vaulted Room," is a good match for it. I’m afraid ...more

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Oct 15, 2008 Jimmy rated it liked it

Shelves: nyrb, male, non-fiction, austria, barthelme-syllabus, year-1970s

This book really didn't work beyond the beginning pages. And yet it wasn't bad. The writing was not engaging enough, the biographical style he chose ("after that, she did this..." etc.) is hard to stomach for too long. You can tell that Handke was conscious of this too, putting in things that broke from the pattern, even a whole page meta-talking about why he decided to write it in this boring style! The book fails in some interesting ways. I feel like Handke never had a good sense of what he wa ...more

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May 17, 2013 Cynthia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir, nyrb, 2013, german-language-literature

...disorder, cold, and silence drive me to distraction;...

And so seven weeks after his mother's suicide at the age of 51, Handke makes himself sit down to write an account of her life, trying to avoid what he terms the "transformations" that would turn his story into art or allow him to distance himself as writers usually do.

In telling the tale of his mother's ordinary, conscribed and hopeless little life, he breaks your heart for this woman, and for many women of similar times and places and t ...more

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