Samuel Beckett Is Closed - Hardcover

Coffey, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 194486959X ISBN 13: 9781944869595

Publisher: OR Books, 2018

Synopsis

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another

Following the schema of Samuel Beckett’s unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres―involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseball play-by-play―produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett’s most radical undertaking―one scholar referred to “Long Observation of the Ray” as a “monument to extinction”―Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today’s world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey’s effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

About this title

About the Author

MICHAEL COFFEY, formerly the co-editorial director of Publishers Weekly, is the author of several books of poems, a book about baseball's perfect games, a book of short stories, and another about Irish immigration to America--which together paint a fairly good portrait of his central interests. His last book, The Business of Naming Things (a short story collection) was a Library Journal top pick for fall/winter fiction titles from independent presses, an Amazon Top 10 pick in literary fiction for the month of January, and a PW "Big Indie Book" and "Best Book of the Week." He lives with his wife in Manhattan and in upstate New York, where he was raised.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

At this age, I know who it is I want to read―though, really, have I read all of Shakespeare or Dickens or (any of) Balzac? Should I? I have not read the bulk of Proust even―prochaine, prochaine. So it is Beckett. I just don't know why. The dedicated Beckett reading began as I waited out the publication of my first book of stories. These stories were much about identity and adoption and fathers and heirs both literary and otherwise and I did not know what the book's reception would tell me about myself―I would have to wait and see. I sometimes think I don't like waiting but the opposite is true―I find waiting for something inherently exciting―and waiting for a book to be published is particularly exquisite; I even find waiting for something miserable, like, say, a colonoscopy, a luxury, as every day that is not the dreaded day has a certain satin lining. Even so, during such an interim as prepublication represents, I was concerned about having a focus to my activities.

....As I woke up each day anticipating an eventual book launch, and readings and a party and, god willing, reviews, I didn't want to make it up each day, my reading that is. I wanted to have decided that already, to have had it decided. One of the things I learned in writing my short fiction was to interrogate what a given story is about. This often helped me shape it―or abandon it. So as I plunged into my Beckett reading two summers ago, rereading James Knowlson's biography, and Beckett's early stories, and a book about the diaries he kept while in Germany in the late 1930s, I asked myself this question: Why Beckett? In the ensuing months I have chased that ball, let me tell you. For example, I was convinced I had discovered that Beckett was the father of an American writer, which promised to be a shocking revelation, not only to those who understand Beckett as having such insight into life's lack of meaning that he would never bring another being into it―"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night," says Pozzo in Godot―but a shock as well to the Beckett estate: a sole "heir of the body?" I became transfixed by the work of this American writer, little known broadly but admired and respected by a certain avant-garde, here and in Europe. Her work is marked by a deep engagement with a purely American―indeed New England―tradition of puritanism filtered through a metaphysics of writing, feminism, and the spiritual extremism of a historic poetics convinced of God's Immanence. This seemed to me not the polar opposite of Samuel Beckett's inherited tradition and his rebellions, but a crafted dissent. This is not me, her work declared. I am not my father's daughter. Not that father. I have another.

Edition details

• Publisher: OR Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 194486959X
• ISBN 13: 9781944869595
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208