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Samuel Beckett's first novel and "literary landmark" (St. Petersburg Times), Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky; it was never published during his lifetime. As the story begins, Belacqua--a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba--"wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final 'relapse into Dublin'" (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.… (more)
User reviews
I was lucky enough to have a close friend living in the UK in 1992 when Beckett's first novel was finally published 60 years after it was written, so Christmas '92 brought with it this literary rarity which at the time was a mystery and enigma to me. After 25 years
What has changed in the meantime with the advent of the internet is that even without direct access to critical analyses of the book I am now able to search out enough background information about it to put it into some sort of context. And translations and lookups of words have also become so much easier. So words that looked like typos such as the consistent use of "strom" where "storm" seems to be the context can now easily be identified as the German word for "stream" or "current". Perhaps one day there will be an annotated edition that will explain all of those sorts of things, but in the meantime it has become much less frustrating to read.
It is still frustrating though because the more you learn about things such as the Smeraldina-Rima being the code name for Beckett's youthful crush Peggy Sinclair and the Syra-Cusa being the stand-in for Lucia Joyce the more you are left wondering who the further code-named characters such as the Polar Bear (sometimes called the PB) and the Alba are meant to be.
But I certainly felt more comfortable reading it now and even began to think that maybe I can still tackle Finnegans Wake.
3 stars.