Happy Days (Paperback)

by Samuel Beckett (Author) "Expanse of scorhed grass rising centre to low mound..." (more)
Key Phrases: arrests gesture, bell for sleep, gazes front (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In 'Happy Days, ' Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, to time past and time present.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802130763
• ISBN-13: 978-0802130761
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #154,010 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Happiness in small things, May 23, 2000

By	Mr L. Hakner (Leeds, England) - See all my reviews

Reading through the reviews here, I am absolutely bewildered as to how anybody could find this play intolerable or (even worse) dull. I am not one of these people that adore every word that Beckett ever wrote; I have severe reservations about some of the later minimalist pieces such as 'Breathe', but 'Happy Days' is one of the most concise and fully realised portraits of the human condition in modern drama. 'Waiting for Godot' is just playful and clever; this is sublime and intellectually adept, combining the structural rigidity of 'Not I' with the fluidity of existential ideas that proliferated throughout all his work. While this is not my favourite play of his, that is entirely due to a personal preference for 'Endgame' - there is nothing tangible that really lets it down.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beckett's most usefully truthful play., February 9, 2001

By	darragh o'donoghue (dublin, ireland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

So often Beckett's philosophical 'universality' seems like an excuse not to confront genuine dilemmas head on. 'Happy Days' is his most tangible work, a grim portrait of a marriage, where a wife is buried up to her waist/waste in a repetitious living death, trying to avoid confronting the reality of her situation, the brutish indifference of her husband, the incremental inevitability of life only getting worse.

Winnie is Beckett's most sympathetic character because she is the one we are the most likely to meet - she is aware of the hopelessness of her situation, but what can she do? Concentrate on something else - how many of us do better? The dissatisfaction most people have with the play presumably lies with the stage directions which interrupt the monologue every couple of words, rendering a fluid, rhythmic read impossible (like Beckett was ever easy). Instead of complaining, go and see it in a theatre, where words and gesture combine to moving effect, even when the language is at its most insistently ironic and playful (and it's very funny too, but don't they always say that about Beckett?). It certainly made me ashamed of the way I treat my wife.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beckett's not for everybody!, December 22, 2006

By	Sylviastel - See all my reviews

I have been a fan of Ruth White ever since I saw her in Lullaby and Let Them Hear You Whisper from the Broadway Archives. They never recorded her performance as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. First, Beckett is not for everybody. Some people are going to find him difficult, hard, and even boring. Those people who have never read Beckett or studied him thoroughly are going to have a hard time understanding his brilliance. Beckett is the king of minimalism regarding theater and the absurd. Here is a middle aged woman stuck in mound doing a daily routine. We never do learn why she is in such a predicament because it's a Beckett metaphor for our lives being stuck in a mound. It's a literary device. He was brilliant.