BOOKS
FACT AND ...
A SORROW BEYOND DREAMS.
By
Peter Handke. Translated
by Ralph
Manheim, Farrer, Straus
&
Giroux. $5 .95 .
In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife , aged 51, committed
suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
The ambivalent character of this newspaper report , which
appears in the first paragraph of Peter Handke 's
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ,
becomes apparent if slightly changed:
A 51 year old housewife committed suicide, etc.
Now it seems to intend, beyond informacion, a meaning. However-
village-housewife-51-Friday night
-shrinks into syntactic structure, away from meaning, because "aged 51,"
inserted after "housewife," interrupts, as if some boor had asked a
question:
"In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife ... "
"How old was she?"
But upon reading the whole report, as it stands, anybody could ask: Does it
happen often? Mainly on Friday night? Mainly among housewives? My
point
is
that every report, in the deluge of news, is infinitely suggestive and
utterly gratuitous. None
is
a story. Whatever data they carry, they speak only
of emptiness. For example, the much reported assassination of President
Kennedy, with its persistent detectival necrophilia, has become merely
