Customer Reviews

Dream of Fair to Middling Women

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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.

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.