«Per lo più senza desideri e un poco infelici». Ritratto della madre perduta in Wunschloses Unglück di Peter Handke

Abstract

In this work Wunschloses Unglück is read as if it were an impressionistic biography in images. The tale was born out of an attempt to give Handke’s fifty-year-old mother, who died of suicide, back a story and an identity. A way to give content and contours to the woman and to neutralize the depersonalizing effect of the news of the event in the pages of the local newspaper. The story of the mother is actually, from the very beginning, a reflection of the writer on his own work, on the difficulty of writing ‘true’ stories, on the tormented search for a precarious balance between description and documentation, between narration and image, between truth and fiction. Handke would seem to be guided by the consciousness that the frame of a story, like a photograph, as the measure and form of things, is the element capable of making them visible, giving them a sense, and ultimately a sort of earthly salvation.