Customer Reviews

The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland

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My only coffee table book of literary criticism, this is an invaluable resource for information and insights into Irish author Samuel beckett, particualry for the early Joyce influenced poems and novels(More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy), but also for interesting glosses on the more obscured prose from the trilogy on to Company. Filled with pictures of the bogs, seasides, asylumns and Dublin streets that set the scene for most of the prose & drama. By paying close attention to the texts, O'brien makes a silent but convincing argument in favor of Beckett the realist, if condensed and reduced to suit his artistic purposes. Filled with cultural detail instead of biographical detail, it is also an interesting look at Dublin before the war. It also contains a printing of "The Capital of Ruins", the short essay Beckett wrote for radio about his experience in St Lo, France, as a memeber of the Irish Red Cross. A quote to show a possible significance:"I mean the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lo will come home realising that they got as good as they gave, that they got, indeed, what they could not hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time-honored conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again". A beautiful, well-researched, and thought-provoking study.