Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics [Hardcover]

Harold Pinter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1999

Harold Pinter has been called "one of the most important playwrights of our day" by The New York Times, and his plays, including The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and The Caretaker, have become seminal works in our literary canon. Pinter has always been reluctant to comment on his work, preferring to let his writing speak for itself. Now, for the first time, Pinter presents his won selections form a prolific body of prose, poetry, and political writings, offering new insight into the man and his literary and dramatic oeuvre. Various Voices comprises a wealth of material and a multiplicity of forms that demonstrate both Pinter's development as a writer and the stylistic precision he so consistently achieves outside the more familiar context of his plays. Through Various Voices the reader can trace Pinter's evolution, from his youthful explorations into the boundaries of his craft to the seasoned maturity of his later work. His nonfiction selections span "A Note on Shakespeare" (1950) to a letter to Peter Wood, the first director of The Birthday Party (1958); the short stories begin with "Kullus" (1949) and end with "Girls" (1995); the poetry ranges from "School Life" (1948) to the powerful and moving "Death" (1997); and the political writings illustrate the depth and lucidity of Pinter's views on human-rights issues around the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Collecting many pieces previously unavailable stateside, this notable book finally gives the U.S. reader Pinter in the roundAas playwright, poet, rebel, iconoclast, fiction writer, political activist and visionary. It's a motley anthology, including everything from interviews, speeches, pieces on cricket and manifestoes to a reminiscence of Samuel Beckett, an appreciation of Shakespeare and shoptalk on writing for stage and screen. And yet for every ephemeral selection, there are at least two of substance. The 10 short stories, most two pages in length, expose the mechanized rigidity of conventional lives with the same subversive humor, surreal leaps and compressed dramatic power that one finds in plays like The Birthday Party and The Homecoming. In his forceful political essays, Pinter, an unapologetic leftist, defends the Sandinista revolution as a progressive democratic movement, condemns Israel's treatment of Palestinians and the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. He blames the Thatcher regime for unleashing an avalanche of greed and corruption, and blasts British prime minister Tony Blair for restricting civil liberties and for cozying up to U.S. imperialism. The welcome gathering of 54 poems ranges from expressionistic lyrics to trenchant political verse. Mysterious, brooding, pregnant with open-ended metaphors, his poems grapple with death, love, loss, war, aging, the search for meaning; they sob for the absence of the sacred in a profane world. This valuable roundup exposes facets of the great playwright that will be unfamiliar to most American readers.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Well known for his spare, iconoclastic plays, such as The Dumbwaiter, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, Pinter holds forth on his life in the theater, cricket, international politics, and love with rare wit and brutal rage. This collection of writings-prose, letters to editors, interviews, speeches, and poetry-gathered by Pinter ranges from wily descriptions of his role as playwright to loving homages to theater friends to scathing attacks on the U.S. government for its military interventions in countries such as Nicaragua and Iraq. In turns ironic (as when he follows a reference to the United States as "the world's `Dad' " with a challenge to "regard the breathtaking discrepancy between US government language and US government action with the absolute contempt it merits") and vulnerable ("Always where you are/ My touch to love you looks into your eyes"), this gathering represents Pinter's rigorous mind impassioned by deep care for his personal world and political reality. Fans of Pinter's plays will relish this broad sweep of his thinking, and newcomers to his work will be challenged and inspired. Recommended for larger theater and literature collections.?Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 205 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1ST edition (March 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116434
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116437
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,314,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Boldness on paper, December 23, 1999

By 

Harris Samaras - See all my reviews

This review is from: Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (Hardcover)

Harold Pinter speaks his own... dialect... without cliches.

As my native language is Greek I usually find the English language plain... not this time!

Harold Pinter here attempts to remove the blindfold from most of us and on our behalf...

Intelligent and impulsive.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Nobel Laureate for Good Reason, June 30, 2011

By 

Philip Vassallo "Philip Vassallo" (Parlin, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (Paperback)

What a dramatist Harold Pinter was. David Mamet and other minimalists of the world stage owe their literary vision to Pinter's trailblazing works for theater. When I saw "The Homecoming," one of his many masterpieces, at the Bouwerie Lane Theater in 1973, my life changed. I had long known that film could so many things that theater could not, but not until this play did I realize theater could do many things that film could not. I strongly recommend any Pinter play, as I have read or seen them all 40-plus of them. But this book is a compendium of his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including his political philippics. No doubt, this Nobel laureate is a playwright and screenwriter of the highest level, and while his other writings do not rise to this level, they offer profound insight into Pinter's worldview, dramatic persona, and sudden wit. This book is a must-read for Pinter students

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The political writings are the turn off, August 13, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (Paperback)

If Pinter contented himself with Becket- Ionesco- like dialogues of the deaf, poetic renderings of fragmented human inadequacy then it would be possible to appreciate a certain poetic quality in him. But he like a good Stalinist has to dictate for us the nature of our political reality, and in doing so turns out to be a truly one- sided fanatic, choosing what to my mind, are the bad- guys in every conflict in the world. His hatred of America is in my mind sickening and unfair. He makes the best into the worst, and celebrates radical terrorists and other chic dirt.
Boo.