The cover of the NYTimes' Sunday Book Review this week? The Letters of Samuel Beckett -- and oh, oh, oh -- I am so happy! Three more volumes will follow this one. This settles that burning question, "What do you want for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Your Birthday/Our Anniversary/This Weekend/Next Weekend/Friday, etc.?"
Joseph O'Neill writes:
Submerged for years in a murk of international literary diplomacy and scrupulous academic exertion, “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” has finally surfaced; and an elating cultural moment is upon us. It is also a slightly surprising moment. Beckett, in his published output and authorial persona, was rigorously spare and self-effacing. Who knew that in his private writing he would be so humanly forthcoming? We always knew he was brilliant — but this brilliant? Just as the otherworldliness of tennis pros is most starkly revealed in their casual warm-up drills, so these letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett’s game and the one played by the rest of us. (Beckett played tennis, incidentally.)
I loves my Beckett.
THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Volume I: 1929-1940
Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
Illustrated. 782 pp. Cambridge University Press. $50
Joseph O'Neill writes:
Submerged for years in a murk of international literary diplomacy and scrupulous academic exertion, “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” has finally surfaced; and an elating cultural moment is upon us. It is also a slightly surprising moment. Beckett, in his published output and authorial persona, was rigorously spare and self-effacing. Who knew that in his private writing he would be so humanly forthcoming? We always knew he was brilliant — but this brilliant? Just as the otherworldliness of tennis pros is most starkly revealed in their casual warm-up drills, so these letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett’s game and the one played by the rest of us. (Beckett played tennis, incidentally.)
I loves my Beckett.
THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Volume I: 1929-1940
Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
Illustrated. 782 pp. Cambridge University Press. $50
Here is the Cambridge Catalogue page.
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