Premier Amour

By Samuel Beckett

Book Overview

The volume brings together six previously uncollected works by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, among them a major work of fiction, First Love, which he began in French in 1946 but didn't finish translating into English until 1972. Also included is the stage work, Not I, which premiered at Lincoln Center in New York in 1972.

The story of First Love, a man's musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father's grave, is designated by its title. Christopher Ricks, in New Statesman, described it as follows: "The cracked and crackling narrator of First Love who tells of how he met a woman on a bench, went back to live with her, and left her as she was giving birth to his child-has all the pertinacity of that bone-deep fatigue which gives Beckett's decrepit figures (ruined leech-gatherers) their ruthless strength, their rigor, not mortis but of moribundity."

In Not I, a Mouth resembling a throbbing wound in the dark, discharges words that, in Ruby Cohn's phrase, 'musically shape a Beckettian life. Beginning with birth-"out into this world" -a female voice tells of a sudden April onslaught of words, undergone by a woman nearing the age of seventy." At its premiere, Clive Barnes in The New York Times called it 'superb," and Martin Gottfried of Women's Wear Daily said it was "a major theatrical and literary event . . . very beautiful and deeply moving-a small and unique masterpiece."

From an Abandoned Work, written in English in 1956, tells the story of a narrator's three-day journey in his youth, turning his back on his weeping mother. Imagination Dead Imagine, written in French in 1965 and translated by the author two years later, focuses on two white bodies, each inscribed in its semi-circle, in a rotunda empty of objects. Enough, written in French a few months after Imagination Dead Imagine, and also translated into English in 1967, has a nameless narrator in a timeless presence reliving her activities "with him."

The volume concludes with Ping, one of the three French pieces written during 1965-66 and translated in 1967, and the short piece for the stage, Breath, which comes from the same period. Of Ping, Ruby Cohn has said: "In its text of 1030 words (in English), a mere 120 are permuted and combined into one of the most remarkable verbal melodies ever written."

Few writers have explored more genres than Samuel Beckett-essay, poem, story, novel, play, mime, radio play, and film.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802151310
• ISBN13: 9780802151315
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

There is nothing short about Beckett's shorts

In this collection: his shorts: First Love, From an Abandoned Work, Enough, Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, Not I, Breath. First Love and Ping are authoritative and powerful. Beckett's humor can toss the livers of the readers down the dune. Let's sample this passage taken from p. 33 of First Love: "One day she had the impudence to announce she was with child, and four or five months gone into the bargain, by me of all people! She offered me a side view of her belly. She even undressed, no doubt to prove she wasn't hiding a cushion under her skirt, and then of course for the pure pleasure of undressing. Perhaps it's mere wind, I said, by the way of consolation." The scenes of parsnips, his moving in, the bench, and priapic disturbance are riveting, impure, and just wicked. Beckett has such a command of language. The reader can also perceive this command in his experimental/musical linguistic cleavage in Ping. Ping takes language on a level beyond abstraction. Language that makes sense, that shares its foundation with clarity. The sole work of sound and music! Others have found Beckett absurd, obtuse, difficult, obscure, but I find his work so powerful, so focus, so clear, so precise. It makes me wonder where readers go especially when I think they simply got lost in the ravine of Beckett's clarity.

Sangers in the cemetery

When take the air he must the first-person felly in this exceptionally well-wrought short story takes a turn in the graveyard where his father lies inhumed. Lunches there too sometimes so he does, on sandwiches and a banana. Have a banana. That's a motif that is. A recurring motif, I'm afraid. Krapp's dumbshow creeps to mind but never mind about Krapp, he sidled into the spotlight at a much later date. In the 69th year of his age he is to boot, a wearish old man. Says so in the stage directions. White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven. No indeed and his bananas notwithstanding, never mind about Krapp. The felly that this felly in First Love really reminds me of is that other first-person felly in the equally exceptionally well-wrought From an Abandoned Work. Hardly likely that they're one and the same stravaging moribund but still certain sardonic postures and turns of phrase make me wonder. The felly in First Love cracks up over some of the inscriptions he wanders past, clutching the headstones and whatnot for support such is the drollery of one or two. The felly in From an Abandoned Work recalls with a kind of exuberant and hilarious wretchedness the time when his mother took up singing and playing the piano. That was awful, qouth in part the harried and hapless chap. The link is as I say not to be completely credited but for some strangely compelling reason I like to believe the duo do have one plot in common. In any case if Sam Beckett in either of these two sublime narratives doesn't grab hold of your actual being and tug on your overcoat about something well then all I can do frankly is paraecho Red Barber in his soundbooth on that fateful day in 1951 and say: Thomson swings. Pause. And we'll see you next year. It's either that or repeat ad nauseam, have a banana. You know what though, Krapp does to be sure listen to a much younger version of himself on those blasted tapes of his--maybe I should in fact factor in this dude into my thinking here. That's Beckett for you, full to bursting with the exhilarating confusion of innumerable prospects.

The rhythm and silenced passion of his writing is amazing.

I enjoyed this book so much that I am currently writing a paper on it. I'm exploring some Beckett's amazing treatment of the conciousness and the movement that is inherent in each of the pieces. I'm also touching on the pieces as they relate to phenomenology and the study of experience expressed in conciousness. Unfortunantly, I need to know how this collection was compiled, when, and under whose authorization. This is very important to my thesis. If any one knows where I could find that information I would appreciate a response.

Wunnerful

There are few short stories that leave one feeling satisfied. Fortunately, this is not one of them. It has been ages since I read it, but I cannot help but recall the feeling it evoked. All in all, love fails us. All in all, we fail to tell well of the process by which it fails us. Beckett fails better than us all. God bless you, Sam, for always pointing us toward the unutterable. The other stories I do not remember. But "First Love" alone is worth all these fellows ask of you.