Dream of Fair to Middling Women [Hardcover]

Samuel Beckett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 1993

Samuel Beckett's "high energy and boisterously libidinous" (Booklist) first novel--a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author during this centenary year.

Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling, Dream of Fair to middling Women offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky, and it was never published during his lifetime. In the novel, Belacqua--a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba--"wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final `relapse into Dublin'" (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although perhaps more accessible, Beckett's previously unpublished first novel features characters, themes, and the unique style characteristic of his later prose works ( More Pricks Than Kicks , Molloy , etc.). Written in English in 1932 when Beckett was 26 and living in Paris, the clearly autobiographical Dream was roundly rejected by publishers. Beckett put it aside, later entrusting it to O'Brien for posthumous publication in order not to offend friends and peers caricatured therein. Main character Belacqua, a writer and teacher, is clearly Beckett himself, although a "Mr. Beckett" also appears later in the work. The fair to middling women of the title range from ditzy to abrasive, while one male friend is described as "a persecution" and an "illegitimate cretin." Moving from Ireland to France to Germany (and from English to French to German, not to mention Italian and Latin), the novel is a literary smorgasbord. Discussions of music and writing jockey with tantalizing references to Hesse, Dmitiri Karamazov and "George Bernard Pygmalion" interrupted by the occasional aside from the narrator--"(Query: why do professors lack the gusts to get sons? Elucidate.)" Compared to the Nobel Prize winner's later exquisite fiction, poetry and plays, some of the writing in this book seems immature, but it does stand on its own as a lively and thought-provoking read.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Beckett's first novel chronicles one Belacqua's difficulties with, well, fair to middling women. It was written when Beckett was 26 but never found a publisher. Its appearance now, four years after the Nobel Laureate's death, is a literary event, but this very fact makes appraisal difficult. Much here is typical: a word-drunk prose, the treatment of the human predicament as a Punch-and-Judy show. But so too is Beckett's disdain--there is no better word--for the reader. "As near as no matter it was a year ago now that he had been inland in another land with another girl" runs the beginning of a not-untypical sentence. Such prose cries out to be read aloud in small snatches in a rich brogue, but on the page it can be leaden. Of interest primarily to Beckett enthusiasts. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/92.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Calder Publications Ltd; First Edition edition (December 31, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0714542121
• ISBN-13: 978-0714542126
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,619,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Early, polysyllabic Beckett, April 10, 2007

By 

Bartolo (New York City, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream of Fair to Middling Women: A Novel (Paperback)

A one-star review should not be allowed to stand alone for this book, though I may provide inadequate challenge. A fan in particular of early Beckett, i.e. of "Murphy," and of the first part of "Watt" which features a certain Mr. Hackett, I found this exuberant, flamboyant exercise in quasi-poetic comic prose almost their equal. There are individual sentences to savor, for words-as-music (if one consider string quartets and oompah bands both musical), that describe outrageously comic situations and personae with an almost ferocious originality. Yes, the work's style, certainly the hero's stream-of-consciousness interlude, owes quite a bit to Joyce, but Beckett's signature dark humor is already richly manifest. Bleakness expressed in richness, buffoonery in elegant phrases, in color and obvious love of the medium. Beckett may have outdone Joyce in a cheeky display of authorial devices whereby he breaks boundaries of fiction and inserts himself, reveals the writing process, etc. All of this scrambles along, full of surprises, without the least pretentiousness but only the enthusiastic abandon of breakneck youth.

This would be a feast for a literary polyglot, but even if, like me, you don't understand much Latin, little French and less German and Italian, and aren't familiar with, or sure of the meanings of words like
catastasis
expunction
emergal
pleroma
erethisms
gedankenflucht
postil
chiappate
mollecone
turbary
dephlogisticate
cang
genau
multipara
pucelle
lanugo
coryza
apodasis
ipsissimosity
ausgeschlossen
exornation
dehiscence
fauces
coenaesthesis
arcitenens
speculum
didcalced
narquois
maneen
lancinated
unprevisible
bawn
pinace
agenesia
or
crassamenta,
you may still enjoy this book tremendously. Such was, is, the infectious work of a young literary and comic genius.

For particulars of plot, consult the editorial reviews above.

The book shines fresh as rainwater. If you haven't yet, read "Murphy" first, then this one.

4 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bombastic., November 21, 2002

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Hardcover)

A text ... as an autobiography: Beckett's dream of women after being ... raped by one of them.
His dream is a, now and then, hilarious and blasphemous, but mostly, irrelevant stream of grotesque and excessive verbal displays and of exaggerated metaphors. He uses different language combinations and different quotations of other authors. So, his model is obvious, but he's a bad epigone. This book has no plot, no plan and misses the basic art of writing: it reproduces feelings, instead of arousing them.
One should read a comment by another Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, in 'Adrift on the Nile', where he punches Beckett KO: life could be absurd, but not the royalties.
I consider the work of Samuel Beckett as grossly overrated. A good play is 'Waiting for Godot', which is in fact an evocation of people who didn't understand the words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra 'God is dead'. But afterwards it became mannerism, just a pose.