Product Description

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing, " the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S.E.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200960 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802134905
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Although Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is best-known for his novels, such as the Molloy series, and his still frequently-performed plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame, he is rarely thought of as a writer of short fiction and prose. Yet he wrote short works devotedly throughout his life; many critics count various Beckett short stories as masterpieces of the form, central to an appreciation of the writer's oeuvre. The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, as the title suggests, collects all of the Nobel Prize-winner's shorter works, such as "First Love," and "The Lost Ones."

Customer Reviews

Beckett's little-known nonfiction
While Beckett's works certainly contain their share of angst, there is more to his work than that, as this collection reminds us. The last work in this collection is a nonfiction essay that Beckett wrote for Irish radio just after World War II called "The Capital of the Ruins." Beckett's subject was a field hospital in the French town of St. Lo that Irish citizens had helped to staff (and where he himself had worked as an interpreter). While the prose is unmistakably Beckett (particularly the self-deprecating humor--at one point he refers to the essay as a "circumlocution"), the optimism of trying to convince his people that they had helped their fellow human beings survive a terrible war more easily is not what we expect from him. Also typical is a wonderful Biblical allusion to the Book of Isaiah and its great swords-and-plowshares metaphor, which he cleverly adapts to modern times. There is a lot of wonderful fiction in this volume (my favorite is "The Cliff," a short meditation, possibly on a preserved skull), but the non-fiction is not to be neglected, and reveals a side of this writer not often seen or considered.

Exile and descent: a prose-world as dark as what it conceals
--When my life-routine is in decay only Samuel Beckett can suffice. While the poorest of Beckett's prose offer only that sunken cold-in-the-stomach feeling of literary indigestion (this may after all be the intended effect), the better segments deliver a richer vein of orchestral inflection, a chalk-and-charcoal tone-poetry of sorts, a lush groggy cipher-state dreaming with angst. The 1946 sequence of nouvelles that are the blessing of this collection ("First Love" "The Expelled" "The Calmative" "The End") are especially vital to this reader, which is to say that they reread the best.
--As one progresses through this volume, from the Joycean exuberance of "Assumption" and "Sedendo et Quiescendo", to the ashen zero-time of "Texts for Nothing" and "All Strange Away", to the bleached naked endurance of "Lessness" and "Stirrings Still", Beckett's narration seems to sink further and further into the mud, a breaking down of readerly expectation into a prose-world as dark as what it conceals.
--I recommend this anthology to patient readers in search of their own zero-hour, and as a startling companion-piece to the major novels and plays.

The forgotten master of short prose
Essential for anyone interested in 20th century prose. Complements the holes in language the novels & plays sought to expose. Beckett knew everything there is to know about form. These shorts move between poetry and prose. See especially the series "First Love", "The Expelled", "The Calmative", "The End"- the bridge from Watt to Molloy. The blackened page of Beckett's paragraph-less mummur is not for everyone, but once you hear his rhythm, it is not easily forgotten.