About the book:
Beckett's first published prose work, a collection of ten linked stories following Belacqua Shuah an indolent Dublin student and self-styled philosopher through a series of comic misadventures. The title is a biblical quotation and the tone is deliberately provocative Beckett in his sardonic early mode, before the stripped-back minimalism of the later work.
Essential for Beckett readers and for anyone interested in seeing where Murphy, Molloy, and the rest began.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear on cover.
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About the author:
Samuel Beckett (1906 to 1989)
Born in Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland, into a prosperous Protestant family, Samuel Beckett was one of the most radical and influential writers of the 20th century. A brilliant scholar at Trinity College Dublin, he moved to Paris in the 1930s, worked as secretary to James Joyce, joined the French Resistance during World War II, and eventually settled permanently in France, writing in both English and French.
Beckett revolutionized modern literature and theatre by stripping away plot, character, and conventional meaning to confront the fundamental absurdity, isolation, and endurance of human existence. His work is spare, darkly comic, and profoundly moving full of repetition, silence, and haunting beauty. He explored what remains when everything else is taken away: memory, language, the body, and the stubborn impulse to go on.
Recurring preoccupations include the failure of language to capture experience, the comedy of despair, the loneliness of consciousness, and the quiet heroism of waiting, enduring, and continuing despite meaninglessness. His famous line from The Unnamable I cant go on. Ill go on. could serve as the motto for his entire body of work.
Major works include:
- Waiting for Godot (1953) the defining play of the Theatre of the Absurd
- The novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (the Trilogy)
- Endgame
- Krapps Last Tape
- Happy Days
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, Becketts influence runs deep across generations. In theatre, he shaped Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and later Jon Fosse. Novelists such as Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee, and John Banville have cited him as a decisive influence, while his minimalist intensity echoes in the work of W.G. Sebald and many others working in the realms of the absurd, the fragmentary, and the existential.
A shy, courtly man who avoided publicity, Beckett created some of the most unforgettable images in world literature two tramps waiting by a tree, a woman buried to her waist in sand, a man listening obsessively to old tape recordings and in doing so, he changed what theatre and fiction could be.
