A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. A Life Story
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. 1st US Edition. Octavo, publisher’s gray cloth over black paper-covered boards, spine stamped in green, original illustrated dust jacket.
"Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind’s emptiness. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think." First US edition of Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Peter Handke’s 1972 novella, an elegy to his late mother. Inspired by her suicide in 1971, the largely autobiographical portrait of grief details her life as an "invisible woman," chronicling her impoverished childhood, her disillusionment as a young mother and wife of an abusive man during the rise of Nazism and World War II, and her death, the result of an overdose by sleeping pills. Karl Ove Knausgård has called the book "one of the most important books written in German in our time" and many consider it to be Handke's finest work. Originally published in Austria in 1972. Stated first printing to copyright page. Stain to first page of text. Light embrowning to endpapers from binder's glue; unclipped dust jacket with some toning. Very good. Item #6881
$50.00