This review is very late. On the week that I covered Maupassant's Afloat, that was the Thursday that the Nobel Prize in Literature ceremony was held. Sharing the win for the Nobel Prize in Literature was Peter Handke, the subject of today's review. I had made plans to either write up this review the day after, but decided to wait my weekly period so that my review of Afloat would get enough traffic. However, due to family circumstance, I was unable to write up my review, and lost track of time. Before I knew it the local fall festival, Neewollah, had begun and with it responsibility. After that, a call for submission for plays for the Summer's theater festival, of which I am still writing and hoping to make the deadline for. Checking my calendar I realized it been three weeks since I had written a review and struggled with the depths of my consciousness to pull this forward. For mercy's sake, I decided to reread a short work by Handke so that the review I typed up could be swift but still poignant. I apologize for the slip but sometimes these things make us human. Do not be fooled at the short length of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams; what it accomplishes with its clean, non romanticized prose has haunted me these last few days and made me reflect on my own mental health, loss, and mortality.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a memoir/semi-autobiography of Handke's mother. She had committed suicide by sleeping pills in 1971, and this is Handke giving us her story. Handke gives us the reason at the very start, that he had to write it down for his sake. To assuage his own feelings of mourning. Though it seems not to have done its job, as when the time comes to wrap up Handke says: "It is not true that writing has helped me. In my weeks of preoccupation 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 of my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment." I speak without exaggeration when I say that this novel destroyed me. I have witnessed death, both from friends and family who have chosen to take their own lives and in unrelated tragedies. In the descriptions of his mother's condition, I can see them in her, and I lose them again. The word "Depression" does not come up in Handke's text. Nor do the words "Mental illness" but in the prose as his mother worsens these things become apparent. An aching, ceaseless tiredness that breaks you down to something inhuman. A formless cancer that rips away at you until you are reduced to the disease itself. Constantly suffocating and in the dark. That is what depression is. And depression and ruin have wedged itself into the ink of the letters that she writes to Handke. The same lines, all to familiar to those who have contracted this illness. The words cast a shadow like death himself, calmly arching back their scythe, you beg Handke to relieve you. You want Handke to just tell you it happened, so that it can be over. So that Frau Handke's suffering can end and it turns yours as you relive your darkness. She writes;
I can’t stand it in the house any more, so I’m always gadding about somewhere. I’ve been getting up a little earlier, that’s the hardest time for me; I have to force myself to do something, or I’d just go back to bed. There’s a terrible loneliness inside me, I don’t feel like talking to anyone. I’d often like to drink a little something in the evening, but I mustn’t, because if I did my medicine wouldn’t take effect.
I’m not logical enough to think things through to the end, and my head aches. Sometimes it buzzes and whistles so that I can’t bear any outside noise. I talk to myself because I can't say anything to other people any more. Sometimes I feel like a machine. I'd like to go away somewhere, but when it gets dark I'm afraid of not finding the way home again. In the morning there's a dense fog and then everything is quiet. Every day I do the same work, and every morning the place is a mess again. There's never any end to it. I really wish I were dead.
These letters write like anyone suffering from the constant gnawing of your existence tearing itself apart. I've heard these words myself. It's always the same. Like a script prepared for some actor, a final monologue before their character walks off stage, forever. I've heard these words so many times, and offered what I could. Sometimes it's enough. Sometimes not. It's a sobering thing to think that you're going to die but you never really consider that someone would want to. Even when you have that same gnawing infectious condition. That black spot, you don't really want to die. The rational part of you is very afraid. It is in reading A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and watching Frau Handke grow from a young girl to a woman too tired and broken to live, that I realize my own mortality. The mortality of those around me. Death is not something that I gave no thought to as a form of bravery. Merely it was the thing that I absolutely could not think about. Not only for myself but for others. As I near by thirties my parents near their fifties and their parents their seventies. I do not wish to picture a future without them but one day that future will come. Inevitably, marching slowly with no particular hurry or malice. What of their trials and tribulations? Will I, like Peter Handke, simply receive a letter that it had been to much? That while I was busy with my own egocentric nonsense tragedy had struck? Will I return to that feeling of numbness that Handke so perfectly describes as "Being startled that I was still holding an object" in my disassociation?
Usually in my reviews I discuss the author and their history. I could talk about Handke, the Austrian born writer. I could talk about the controversy surrounding him. Such as his support of Milosevic. Peter Handke is an interesting subject, and Lord knows I'm no stranger to controversy, having reviewed the works of Knut Hamsun and Joseph Conrad before. Handke will have his time again however, as I feel the most important thing I took from A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is not Handke himself but a change of consciousness. A shift towards awareness of a universal truth. For a moment I turned my gaze and met Death's eyes, and the chill up my spine made me blink. It's actually kind of hilarious. Handke mentions in the book that his mother would read literature and see herself in the characters. That is exactly what has happened to me here. I see myself in Frau Hanke, but also my friends. Those that continue to struggle and those that have given up.A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is simple in concept, the life story of an Austrian woman, but it awakened a primal fear within me that is still haunting me. Damn the controversy, Handke earned the Nobel, this is a masterpiece.
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