A review by tomleetang
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke, Ralph Manheim, Jeffrey Eugenides

3.0

"These two dangers - the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences - have slowed down my writing, because every sentence I am afraid of losing my balance."

How do the individual and the general meet? How does one tell a specific story but also make it relevant for others?

This precise prose elegy is not just for the author's mother, but for a whole generation of women who found themselves defined by their environment, with very little chance of defining themselves.