First love, and other shorts

Beckett's short stories display his affection for the run-on paragraph. Some paragraphs went on for pages. Overall I enjoyed his short stories more than other work sampled by the author. In the title story, Beckett opens with a cemetery scene--something to which I as a genealogist could relate. Of

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course, I chided him for not recording all the tombstone information on his first visit, but his purposes in visiting graveyards are different than mine. The story then relates the story of his encounter with the first woman he thought to marry. "Enough" was a little more sexually vulgar than my reading comfort level. "From an Abandoned Work" started off nicely and then got weird. I would classify "Imagination Dead Imagine" and "Ping" as experimental works. They go beyond the bounds of traditional literature. "Ping" reads like what you are seeing on a screen followed by the "ping" sound and the notation in seconds. Definitely a bit strange to read. "Not I" is a monologue featuring "Mouth", with performance rights managed by the Dramatists Play Service. The speech is broken, as if one is only hearing bits and snatches. I'm not exactly certain what to call "Breath." It's only a one page work and is rather strange. I certainly see why Beckett's experimentation earned him a Pulitzer, but overall, his work doesn't appeal to me.

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