Sorrow Beyond Dreams Peter Handke's Book Report

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This postmodernist writing that finally ends up having a dialogue with itself reveals an idea common to most of the postmodern art: that language and formulations, as means of expression, are also a means of finding the meaning of something, and that most often, meanings do not reside out of language.

But, at the same time, Handke also demonstrates that the life can sometimes be to terrible to be expressed in language.

The book ends, significantly, with the same Handke sitting at his desk and reading the article about the suicide of a woman. It is not only that the writing turns upon itself, to reveal that the most important subject of the book has not been altogether elucidated and has not been given meaning to yet, but also, the fact that the author is in front if a piece if a newspaper article relating this event is crucial: the newspaper does the same thing that his book proposes to do- relates the event of the suicide, but at the same time formulates it, or tries to put it into words.

Handke's work is thus partly biographical- with the biography of his mother which is presented in a very plain style where there are no artifices and no dramatic episodes- and partly the author's play with words, and his attempt to translate the experience into language:

Reading the paper, drinking beer, looking out the window, I gradually sank into a tired, impersonal sense of well-being.

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Yes, I thought over and over again, carefully enunciating my thoughts to my-self: THAT DOES it. THAT DOES it. THAT DOES it. GOOD. GOOD. GOOD. And throughout the flight I was beside myself with pride that she had committed suicide. In the house that evening I climbed the stairs. Suddenly I took several steps at one bound, giggling in an unfamiliar voice, as if I had become a ventriloquist. I ran up the last few steps. Once upstairs it humped my chest lustily and hugged myself." (Handke, 84)

The final passage obviously relates his own moment of crisis in the attempt to express the "sorrow beyond dreams" of his mother's life, thus proving that the sorrow in the title can be attributed both to his mother's life and to his own, and perhaps even to life in general.

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