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Title: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin, Antony Cronin ISBN: 0-306-80898-6 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Getting to Know Him
Comment: A careful, highly readable and sometimes very amusing account of the life of the Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director and sports enthusiast. This gives a nuanced and sensitive account of the Irish background from which Beckett at first painfully extracted himself to a new life in France, but which he was always attached to sentimentally and creatively, never being too busy to meet with a young writer from Ireland, or to drink with old Irish friends and wax nostalgic about the Liffey. This book, while generally very admiring (Cronin has no time for the last novel), is actually more discerning and knowledgeable about Beckett's affairs emotional, literary and dramatic, especially in the later years of his career when Cronin was one of the first to write about him at length in the TLS and elsewhere, as well as to meet him and ask questions such as, "Krapp seems to think he had the possibility of happiness...?" To which Beckett calmly replied, "That doesn't mean he did though, does it?"
You get a fair sense of the man and his times, and a more modulated sense of his slow climb to success, even after "Waiting for Godot" made his name. Never has fame seemed less romantic. Cronin is that best of acquaintance-biographers - no fool, but not an assassin either. Fun as well as thorough. I can't think what will come to light to make a better biography possible.
Rating: 4
Summary: A highly readable book: a fascinating, mysterious genius
Comment: For a pretty fat bio, I found this a surprisingly easy and swift read. Cronin, who certainly knows the lay of the land, the type of people, and even some of the actual folks Beckett knew, seems a fair and judicious biographer. I found the book most useful in charting Beckett's development as an artist from the callow "knowingness" of his early novels and poems to the wry despair of his mature work. One is impressed both by Beckett's inconsistent touchiness about the handling of his work by adapters, and by his quiet generosity with near strangers as well as friends. Cronin includes plenty of delightful trivia, from quotes ("I am not a philosopher; one can only speak of what is in front of one and that is simply a mess") to the fact that Beckett always accented the first syllable of Godot.
Rating: 5
Summary: A valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist
Comment: This is a valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist. The slow and unconventional evolution of Beckett's art is well described. This biography is, I feel, honest [in as much as any biography can be such] and does not mythologize. Sad that in Beckett's last days he appeared to be consumed with remorse.
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Title: Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson ISBN: 0684836580 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150918 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett, S. E. Gontarski ISBN: 0802134904 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Reading Godot by Lois G. Gordon ISBN: 0300092865 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802134262 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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