The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual ...
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Aug 22, 2009
Buck
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Samuel Beckett was so full of shit. I say this with all due respect, but I’m not kidding. How else would you characterize a writer who gloomily intones, ‘There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication’ – and proceeds to test drive every ‘vehicle of communication’ on the lot? Or who constantly bitches and moans about the ‘torture’ of writing a ‘simple sentence’, yet somehow manages to squeeze out eight novels, dozens of dramatic works and about 15 000 letters in his c
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Sep 22, 2011
Robert
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Fascinating. This volume covers the years of More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and the early poetry. More importantly, it cover the years when Beckett suffered the tortured process of becoming the writer who could produce Godot and all the other masterpieces. There is an almost unrelenting struggle to free himself from the ties of his mother, and Joyce and Ireland, the struggle, too, to get beyond or beneath the surface of literature, of language, of life itself, to express what he later referre
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Jan 28, 2012
Craig
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You have to love, or at least be profoundly intrigued by, Beckett to take on the (projected) four volumes of his letters. If you are, you have two choices. Start with volume 2, which covers the period when Beckett's genius took form, or start with volume 1 and know that you're in it for the intimations of what's to come. For me, it was worth it. There are a dozen or so letters--msot of them written to Tom McGreevy (Beckett's friend and minor writer) but also a terrific letter (9 Juoy 1937) w
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Mar 17, 2010
James
rated it:
This is a complete and comprehensive collections of letters in terms of biography. I'm not sure I've read a better treatment of subject through letters. They concern the young Beckett, up to the age of 34 or so. As letters they're fun because Beckett was an amusing and playful correspondent. His letters are full of puns and gossip verging on cattiness, often about people who've become almost legendary in 20th century literature. The years covered here are those in which he was beginning to
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Dec 20, 2009
Sam
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These are surprisingly tedious - arch, juvenile, and concerned with second-rate people. I read and read on thinking I would find something wonderful - but never did. A waste of time, alas.
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