With thanks to the New York Review Books, Peter Handke's A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS is once again available. This slim but pungent volume opens with an elegant introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides ( author of 'Middlesex' and 'The Virgin Suicides' ) and few writers could better place this memoir of Handke's response to his mother's suicide in 1971 in a more meaningful perspective.

Handke writes about his mother in a way that creates a story rather than a history of a life. There is so much understantding of how the world changed from Pre-WW II through the post war emptiness of a desecrated Europe and its accompanying slow move toward healing that plagues burned countries after victories or defeats signalling the end of wars. Handke's mother remains nameless which serves to make her a more universal figure than just another individual. And using the word 'individual' is actually in contrast to the major problem of this tragic women's life. Always a women of poverty, suffering the cruelties that that station in life suggests (a fatherless child, a marriage of convenience that results in a life with an alcoholic husban, self induced abortions, begging for food, the lack of simple luxuries like Christmas gifts, etc) his mother was not a woman who considered herself an individual: she was a daughter of a postwar poverty and gloom, aligning herself with Socialism which further negated her worth as a unique person. Her gradual withdrawal in yet another group (those with 'nervous breakdowns') overtured her ultimate complete withdrawal from the world as she finds taking her own life the final solution to her grief.

Handke reserves his own response to the loss of his mother until the end of this memoir - a section of memories, flashbacks, regrets and tears that force him to place his final godbyes in the form of the written word. The writing is powerful in its simplicity, unfettered by false emotions, straight forward in forcing both the author and the reader into confronting the tragedy of suicide. Perhaps many readers will use this short tome to find healing of like experiences: others will read this book simply because it is a beautifully constructed story of the life on an Everyman/woman. Highly Recommended.

Glad to see this back in print. I've relied on a library copy when I wanted to revisit it. Spend the hour or two it takes to read this and it will stick with you forever. I hope they've touched up the few missteps in Mannheim's translation. Otherwise, this near-perfect memoir puts most of its flabby and narcissistic successors (the list is endless) to shame.

At once stark and lyrical, Handke's A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS is one of the finest memoirs I've read, and, without a doubt, the strongest portrait I know of a mother by her son--a portrait made strong, in part, by Handke's ability to see and analyze his mother's life within the context of the limited choices available to her, and by his ability to see the ways in which her life is molded by the "genre" of a life comparable to a woman of his mother's class and station. It is, too, at once loving and mercilessly painful. I'm not a great fan of Handke's--the intensity of his self-consciousness, or the cool ironic stances of his early work--but this brief book is an exception. Read it & you will be reading it again throughout your life.

I enjoyed this book. I wish that we had spent more time with Cal after the discovery of her true sexual identity - I wanted to learn more about how s/he coped with the discovery. I felt the book screeched to a halt a bit too quickly. That said, it was a good read, interesting and well written.

I have been asked countless times what this book is about. Sorry, I can't tell you. This isn't a book about one thing. This isn't a book about a few things. This book covers more than just a life, more than just one lifetime. I loved "The Virgin Suicides", and I figured that I wouldn't be able to go wrong with another Eugenides book, even though I wasn't quite sure about the subject. Hermaphrodite? Greece? Detroit? Not things I'm that versed on, or ever thought I was that interested in. The book starts with a man named Cal, who, the first of his life, was known as a girl, named Caliope. Callie, as she was called, knew she was a little different, what she didn't know was that this was predetermined by not her parents, but by her grandparents and beyond. Hers is a struggle that not many people know, but one that will make you think of her/him for a long long time after finishing this book. Think you wouldn't enjoy reading a book about hermaphrodites, Greece, Turks, Detroit, incest, silkworms, Prohibition, race riots, runaways, Muslims, Hercules Hot Dogs, and an innocent confused girl/boy in the middle of it all, then you're wrong. You will.

Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" belongs to the sprawling intergenerational book genre, but he explores themes with a fresh perspective. Calliope (later Cal) is the omniscient narrator of a story that begins in 1922 Smyrna, Asia Minor and ends almost 80 years later in Berlin. Most of the story takes place in Detroit, a city that he describes with great insight and emotion. Eugenides expertly switches between the voices of the grown-up Cal and the young Calliope; therefore, we experience events as Calliope did, but with the perspective of Cal (at age 40). Calliope is a winning storyteller, observant, funny, and with realistic childhood and adolescent feelings. Throughout the book, Eugenides demonstrates that Callie's circumstances underlie experiences shared by all: Pain, love, confusion, feelings of being both the same as and different from. I think Eugenides somewhat underestimates the emotional toll that Callie's journey would entail, particularly during her long separation from her family as she makes the psychological transformation from Calliope to Cal. Usually; however, the insights and feelings are so true that it reads like an autobiography.

While the story is compelling, there are some problems that interfere with a fluid read. At times, narrative transitions are handled awkwardly through either through over use of ellipses (...) or with somewhat clunky sentences: 'Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity not only of petroleum but of many other things as well,' which breaks into a long list of scarce hope, food, phone calls, clean socks, etc. He also overplays his hand at the Greek tragic motif he is constructing ('Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation'!'; though he later, in apparent contradiction, concludes that we can forge our own truer identities) and in his broad caricatures of ethnic and religious types. There's also a sly quality that sets up "surprise" situations: In the most egregious case of 'magical realism,' or just plain gimmickry, Eugenides uses the conceit of using his fictional character 'Jimmy Zizmo' as the 'real' identity of the actual character, Nation of Islam Muslim founder W.D. Farr, and the denouement concerning Calliope's father and uncle lacks credibility. Mostly though, Eugenides' story is compelling and humorous, and he masterfully evokes place and character (industrial Detroit; a hilarious indictment of an ultra-hip 1970s-era surgeon/sexologist), with a casual ease that nicely belies the serious themes.

The book bears some resemblance to Michael Chabon's own Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." In both, the immigrant experience and the forging of a new identity are central, characters journey to find their own "American dream," and urban settings help shape their lives. While Chabon is the more nimble phrase writer, Eugenides is similarly poignant and symbolic. Like Chabon, Eugenides uses metaphor (based on reality) as he explores the ideas of being 'different,' the sometimes-artificial nature of boundaries, and the Greek notion of fate. It is an entertaining and often moving story that, despite some minor annoyances, I recommend very highly.

"The Virgin Suicides" is not a satire on suicide, it is simply a contemporary fable about how a tragedy impacts people's lives in the most ambiguous ways. It uses merged perspectives, countless tidbits of scattered information, and memories to tell it's story about the downfall of innocence, and the mysteries of life which are never explained. "The Virgin Suicides" does not have a straight-forward narration, it is up to reader to draw up his or her own conclusions, it is simultaneously compelling and frustrating to read. But if there's one thing that really makes this a strong novel, it is the way it potrays the nameless narrators are regular teenagers caught up in the confusion of youth and the 70's, longing to save the inevitable doomed Lisbon sisters. There are many ways in perceiving the sisters. Observing their actions through-out the book, and the way their suicides leaves so many questions unanswered, that specific aspect leaves a very unsettling impression. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to be challenged intellectually and emotionally.

This is the kind of book that cannot be put down, or taken lightly by the reader, and one which almost leaves a gritty residue on the reader, immersing them in the tale of the Lisbon sisters. Beautifully written, it is captivating to the last, a book which I read in one sitting, unable to remove myself from the story. It strikes an especially deep chord with me, as it takes place in the city of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, my home town. Jeffrey Eugenides actually grew up here, and his references to the city, the social inequalities, and even the story's school itself (containing very obvious references to Eugenides' actual high school) all hold true today, and would evoke a laugh from any person who has actually driven through the local spots mentioned in the book, or has seen the patches of grass remaining in the void of trees cut down during the 70's Dutch Elm scare. Indeed, this book is a must for any Grosse Pointer, and highly recommended to high school students, adults, anybody...this really is a great book, and will leave you wondering, mourning, and most importantly, thinking. Read this book...it is one of my all time favorites.

This is one of the wittiest novels I've read about those eternal favorites, sex and death. It's sly and tongue in cheek from start to (almost) finish, but like all good comedy plays it straight. Eugenides has an original voice that manages to combine lyricism and reportage in well-crafted and well-paced sentences. By interposing a couple of decades between the suicides and the narration, he gives himself the distance necessary for the narrative voice to interweave two strands: a loyally remembered early adolescent hormonal fixation on beautiful girls - humorous and poignant in itself - and a grown-up compulsion with accumulating historical data and eyewitness accounts that can't quite prevent a tendency to mythologize the past even while trying to recapture and understand it. The tension between then and now, between cold fact and emotional memory, makes the unnamed narrator's account serious in the telling but daffy to the core.

He's a keen observer. Adolescent enthusiasm and adult nostalgia both inform the obsessive attention to details of old photographs, tubetops and brassieres, Rice Krispie treats wrapped in wax paper, canary yellow socks, shoe polish tins gouged to silver centers, and so on, a constant, colorful parade throughout the narrative. The past seems to cast a long shadow. Yet the eager, awkward boys who have grown up to have mournfully invoked thinning hair, soft bellies, and hearts filled with regret can only be in their 30s at the time of the story's telling. This burden-of-experience earnestness for men still so young is one of the novel's many amusements.

The narrator's sensibilities are consciously over the top, with extravagant statements such as the claim that the boys' experiences with the Lisbon sisters "have scarred us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives." It's supported by the fact that as adults they've refurbished the childhood tree house they abandoned as teenagers and turned it into a museum to the sisters. The vividly evoked and often oddball minor characters - neighbors, students, ambulance drivers, doctors, reporters - are funny because of their deadpan earnestness, even while they utter profound banalities that would sink a less clever novel. Here, their affidavit-like statements tickle the reader's funnybone. All the conventional reasons for suicide are proposed without ever quite solving the mystery of why the sisters killed themselves.

The decay of the Lisbon house after the first suicide is so carefully tracked that it's impossible not to get the joke - the house as metaphor for the human condition is an old chestnut of creative writing, but the progressive dilapidation of the Lisbon house is delineated with a skillful morbidity that makes fun of itself. Apart from Lux Lisbon, the doomed sisters aren't differentiated, because they aren't really remembered as individuals. They are real enough, but they are mostly icons of desire. Although numerous named boys act and speak, and the handsome Trip Fontaine emerges as a temporary main character, the story isn't really about any of them, either. It's about all of them. Despite occasional specific locational references that suggest a single narrator, the universal authorial references to "us," "we," and "our" ("She had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us") make the narrative voice not one person speaking on behalf of the many, but literally the collective voice of the boys whose imaginative lives revolve around their beautiful neighbors. This monotypic treatment of the lumpen adolescent psyche is one of the novel's most humorous elements. Another achievement is the light touch in evoking facts of life in an affluent Detroit suburb during the 1970s, including fashions, pop music, pollution, and Dutch elm blight. As he concludes his comic romp, Eugenides smoothly shifts on the last two pages to a quiet, elegiac finish. Having smiled often since page one, you close the book with the satisfaction of finishing a very pleasurable read.