A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, PETER HANDKE (Nobel prize for literature, 2019)
This is a semi-autobiographical novella, about Peter Handke’s mom. He writes whatever he remembers about her. It is not a detailed but a brief description of her difficult life. She suicides at 51. After his mother’s death, he says that he has an apathetic feeling about death. I felt as though he was relieved because his mom had a difficult life and ended up with a mental illness. He was relieved because he couldn’t see her suffering.
As a young woman, she is not allowed to study a lot but still, she joins a cooking class. She later falls in love with a married man and gives birth to Peter. Then she gets married to a guy but doesn’t love him, with whom she has a few more children and many abortions. She is bound by her duties at home; cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. but from the novella, one gets a feeling that she didn’t want to be tied down. Facing the hardships of poverty and life as such, having had almost nothing to eat at times, she faces a lot of difficulties. The period being the Nazi era or war.
What if she had wishes and desires to be someone or to do something else? The fact that she didn’t talk much off and on, makes it even more difficult to understand her true wants.
I found this novella tough. It’s a grim, moving tale of a lady, almost invisible.
It is a must read and I think I will have to reread it to understand it better.