Details
Synopsis
Though his writing is famous for its silences and ellipses, Samuel Beckett was a prolific and lively letter writer, penning over 15,000 letters between 1929 and his death in 1989. In this, the first of four planned volumes of his correspondence, we witness Beckett in a formative period, as he slips away from his promising career as a scholar (he resigned his prestigious lecturer post at Paris's École Normale Supérieure in 1932). Itinerant, disgruntled, self-deprecating of his own work, and voracious for the works of others, Beckett in these letters is full of ribald humor and seething dissatisfaction in equal measures. His brilliance and darkness are evident everywhere, with nearly every letter dipping into quotations of French, Latin, and Spanish, and dripping with arcane vocabulary and esoteric wordplay worthy of his mentor, James Joyce. Too worldly and learned to be a typical depiction of a young author, Beckett's early letter's nevertheless provide a stunning portrait of a powerful artistic mind desperately scouring for the proper style and subject for his words. The volume concludes shortly after the publication of his first novel (MURPHY), and his visit to Nazi Germany.
| Details | | Series: | The Letters of Samuel Beckett |
| Size | | Length: | 782 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 46.7 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Samuel Beckett, that most taciturn and private of 20th-century writers...was in fact one of the century's great correspondents...[T]he Beckett we meet in these piquant letters,...is rude, mordantly witty and scatological yet often (and this is perhaps the biggest surprise) affectionate and wholehearted."
(03/05/2009)
"[O]n the evidence of this volume, [Beckett's letters]...would...[rank with] the ten or twenty greatest books of their time....[T]he letters...are in the main concerned with the same thing...: the attempt to understand what he hoped to achieve and how the art in question could help him."
(03/13/2009)
"This is an extraordinary work of scholarship on the part of its main editors....The years covered by these letters also are the ones in which Beckett would lay the intellectual and experiential foundations for the great leap into the new that his writing would make in the 1940s."
(03/18/2009)
"[I]f you want to trace the tributaries of [Beckett's]...mournful wit to their source, the letters are invaluable....What we have here is...the early progress of an intensely clever, emotionally febrile figure, whose worries are further chafed by his dismay at how directionless that progress seems."
(03/30/2009)
"Admirers of Samuel Beckett, arguably the greatest writer in English of the second half of the 20th century, have grown used to waiting for Godot...In the meantime, these similarly anticipated letters have quite definitely arrived, and in an edition more sumptuous than one ever imagined....Best of all, each letter is annotated in detail, with every person, event and allusion scrupulously identified."
(04/02/2009)
"We always knew he was brilliant--but this brilliant?....[T]hese letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett's game and the one played by the rest of us."
(04/05/2009)
"The editorial work behind this project has been immense in scale....The standard of the commentary is of the highest....THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT is a model edition."
(04/30/2009)
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