The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett

By Samuel Beckett

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802145140
• ISBN13: 9780802145147
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 2047 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

In the end we are all impotent

Norman Mailer once said about the work of Beckett that ' we are not all impotent'. For the man- of - would - be action Mailer Beckett's focusing on the end game, on the sloth of it all, of our not being able to be more than our poor bodies let us seep- seemed a poor caricature of the human condition. But Beckett saw a fundamental truth of human life of the human situation in a way no other writer did before. Old Age and disability, breakdown and failure were Beckett's true home. He reacted to his great master and teacher Joyce who seemed to want to reword the universe with his own mysterious new names, with a profound understanding of how few words could make the silences even deeper. Calder here is a good critic and friend, and provides little introductions to Beckett's Early Fiction( Dante and the Lobster, Murphy, Watt) and then his Post- War French Works (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot, Endgame) for the Poetry (Cascando, Four Poems) and for the later works( How it is, Imagination Dead Imagine) Calder even finds at the end of darkness and desperation a playful sliver of hope. What is unquestionable is Beckett's strategic brilliance his wise reaction to Joyce and his making for himself a voice which speaks to the heart of mankind in its own definite way. Let us hear it a bit and wonder why we seem to understand it and not. At the end of the end , the final section of 'How it is" Beckett writes- "silence and more longer and longer silences vast tracts of time we at a loss more and more he for answers I for questions sick of life in the light one question how often no more figures no more time vast figure vast stretch of time in his life in the dark the mud before me mainly curiosity was he still alive YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME utter confusion