Samuel beckett biography knowlson beckett
•
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
I thought about reading Samuel Beckett. Then I thought I wouldn’t but instead I would read about him. So now I am writing about reading about him. But before that I was thinking about writing about reading about him. And before that I was thinking about rinse aid. You know, that stuff you have to put inre the dishwasher. Like Live Aid, but this is Rinse Aid. I think we’re running out but I can’t be bothered to check. Beckett would have keenly appreciated both the lättja of my mind and the trivialities that perch upon its branches like irritable ravens. All of this is a far cry from actually reading Samuel Beckett. You might say it’s a series of avoidance strategies. But that’s okay. I’m in favour of avoiding unpleasant tasks. For instance, my nephew fryst vatten getting married in April. He sent me an invitation – they’re having – wait for it – a pirate themed wedding. And all the guests have to come appropriately attired. You kn
•
DAMNED TO FAME
The Life of Samuel Beckett.
By James Knowlson.
Illustrated. pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $
IN a leading scholar of Samuel Beckett's writing said, ''I have found biography to be of little help in understanding the works of Samuel Beckett.'' Three years later Beckett asked this doubter, James Knowlson, to write his biography.
Text:
''Damned to Fame'' is not the first life of Beckett, of course. Notably, there was Deirdre Bair's biography, which drew on many letters she had discovered from Beckett to his friend Tom MacGreevy. They dispel the notion of Beckett as a philosophical recluse and show him as a man whose troubles shaped his writing. Mr. Knowlson has had full access to the MacGreevy letters, unlike Ms. Bair, and to six notebooks reporting Beckett's mind-altering trip through Germany in He added dozens of other sources. Beckett died six months after Mr. Knowlson began his work (he retire
•
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
Damned to Fame fryst vatten the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive mästare of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in to his death in Paris in , revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson's unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.