Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett

Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett

Here, more than sixty years after it was written, is Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett's first novel. Written in a white heat in the summer of 1932 at the Hotel Trianon in Paris, when the author was poor and struggling, Dream of Fair to middling Women offers us a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Beckett, just twenty-six at the time, to date had published a few poems, including the prize-winning Whoroscope, a penetrating essay on Proust, and a contribution to the collective study of James Joyce's then Work in Progress, later to become Finnegans Wake. Beckett submitted the novel to several English publishers, all of whom found it too scandalous, too risky (or, said some, too risque), or too literary. Subsequently Beckett put the work aside, although he pilfered from it from time to time. After fame had overtaken him, he was still reluctant to publish it, partly because it contained thinly disguised and not always flattering portraits of some of the author's friends and acquaintances in Dublin, and partly because he was always his own harshest critic. The hero of Dream is one Belacqua - a youthful precursor of Molloy - who wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final 'relapse into Dublin' (The New Yorker). His love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba. Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity in its own right. The author delights in wordplay and the sheer joy of language - indeed, of several languages. This is, too, one of Beckett's most Irish works, yet there is about it as well the sense of timelessness anduniversality that mark his later writing. Above all, it is filled with the unique Beckettian humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of the vision. In his later years, Beckett agreed that Dream should eventually be published, but only some little time after his death. Now, more than six decades after it was written, this chest into which Beckett threw his wild thoughts can at last be opened, and its contents savored and enjoyed.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781611457582
ISBN 10	1611457580
Title	Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Author	Samuel Beckett
Series	Arcade Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Arcade Publishing
Year published	2012-09-01
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable