What a beautiful, haunting little book (76 pages). Peter Handke’s biography of his mother and her suicide. Handke wrote A Sorrow Beyond Dreams in a few weeks immediately following his mother’s death to ward off apathy. Originally published in 1974 then republished with an introduction from Jeffrey Eugenides in 2002.

It’s such a tiny book so rather than go on I’ll just give you this quote, a rare moment when the text slips into first person:

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.

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