Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Nobel prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. He gives expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which his ideas are most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.
In the introduction, Gontarski discusses Beckett's creative roots in the tradition of Irish storytelling and the perpetual evolution of his writing as he "pushed beyond recognizable external reality and discrete, recognizable literary characters, replacing them with something like naked consciousness or pure being."
From the 1929 "Assumption," published in transition magazine when Beckett was twenty-three, to the aptly named "Stirrings Still," written when he was eighty-two, and including a new translation of "The Image" as well as the newly translated and previously unpublished "The Cliff," Gontarski has arranged Beckett's work into a smooth chronology that suggests, as he puts it, "Beckett's own view of his art, that it is all part of a continuous process, a series."

In counterpoint to Beckett's plays, novels and poems is the equally brilliant shorter prose?the stories, soliloquies and depersonalized monologues he wrote throughout his career. Here, collected and edited by the editor of On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, are all three-dozen instances of that prose, only some of which have appeared previously in books; one story, "The Cliff," is debuting here. The earlier entries indicate Beckett's uneasy apprenticeship before he found his voice and a matching style. The Joycean logorrhea of "Sedento and Quiescendo" (later part of Dream of Fair to Middling Women) and the conventional narration of "A Case in a Thousand" don't achieve much in themselves. Still, as with "Assumption," the earliest piece here, they display the stirrings of a genius that would take shape in the stories of 1946 and in Texts for Nothing, as in Waiting for Godot. Some of the stories?"The End"; "The Expelled"; "First Love"; "The Calmative"?are acknowledged short masterpieces, meandering Cartesian misadventures of minds and bodies stumbling over one another. In later works, Beckett can be seen tracing the further patterns of a mind narrating its disintegration (the "skull alone in a dark place"), as in "Imagination Dead Imagine," "Ping" and a series of eight pieces called "Fizzles." Elsewhere, in "From an Abandoned Work" and "Enough," the author's wanderers are curtailed, his "Lost Ones" vainly searching a cylindrical prison for an exit, his aged narrators tramping through their memories. In the closing "Stirrings Still," written at age 82, Beckett refines and intermingles these elements in a despairing, delightful voice that struggles with what its owner called its "obligation to express." Despite some juvenilia and curiosa, this is an invaluable one-volume addition to the Beckett shelf.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There had to be a Samuel Beckett. The literary cosmos had to contain at least one writer who could distill the human condition down to its essentials in prose as spare and rhythmic as breath. Beckett is the master of the tight focus, of watching us put one foot in front of the other, and his fierce attention to matters of the body serves to unleash the crazy chant of the mind. These distinguishing traits are found in many brilliant, sometimes maddening variations in Beckett's short fiction. In his fine introduction to this unprecedented collection, Beckett scholar Gontarski describes these pieces as a "major creative outlet" for Beckett and then ponders the question of why these works are so little known. He places Beckett's short fiction firmly within the context of the Irish storytelling tradition and analyzes its "direct dramatic and poetic simplicity." The collection's chronological arrangement--from "Assumption," Beckett's first published story, written in 1929 when he was 23, to "Stirrings Still," written just before his death, 60 years later--reveals the evolution of Beckett's resonant oeuvre and allows us to appreciate anew his wry and piercing vision. Donna Seaman

Nobel Prize winner Beckett's prose, most especially his stories, historically have taken a back seat to his theatrical works and poetry. The works in this collection, eloquent distillations of the writer's ideas, clearly demonstrate how unfortunate this oversight has been. To be fair, however, the complex publishing history?wherein some stories were published in a variety of collections, while others appeared only in journals, and still others were grouped in poetry or drama collections?and the adaptation of many of these works for stage or radio contributed to the lack of a cohesive understanding of Beckett's legacy. In addition to bringing these scattered works together, Beckett scholar Gontarski (editor of The Beckett Studies Reader, Univ. Pr. of Florida, 1993, among others) goes to great lengths to explain the genesis of the pieces in an introduction offering historical context and in copious notes and appendixes. While libraries may already hold most of these works, this work is well worth the investment for its comprehensive approach. Recommended for all collections.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.