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Samuel Beckett has always been something of an enigma. Born and raised in Ireland, he moved to France as a young man and remained there, risking his life during the war in his work with the French Resistance. Kind, generous, and often funny in real life, his plays and novels are implacably dark, filled with despair, need, and isolation. In Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, biographer Anthony Cronin limns a deft portrait of the great writer using Beckett's letters, early fiction, and Cronin's own acquaintance with both his subject and several of Beckett's friends in Dublin. Taken together, these sources reveal a multifaceted man.
Beckett passed through many phases on his way to greatness: a French teacher at Dublin College, a member of the Paris circle that formed around James Joyce in the late 1920s, and later an active participant in the French Resistance. The years following World War II proved a fertile time in Beckett's creative life, encompassing his transition from the autobiographical to the modernist impersonal--perhaps his greatest works. Anthony Cronin admirably balances his portrayal of the man and the artist, rendering the details of Beckett's uneventful life and his rich imagination in a way that fleshes out the man even as it celebrates the genius.
Book Description
Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock became a prizewinning student at Trinity, flirted with scholarship, and, in Paris, found himself at the center of its literary avant-garde as an intimate friend of James Joyce. But he was a young man who struggled with complexities in his own nature as well as with problems of literary expression. In the small provincial city of Kassel, Germany, the cosmopolitan Beckett experienced a faltering entanglement with his cousin-one of the first in a series of problematic encounters with women. The war years, which he spent as a member of the Resistance and a refugee in the South of France, brought Beckett the self-probings and discoveries that led to the great works. Then, with his sudden and astonishing fame, the balloons of myth began to inflate and a stereotype was born-frozen in exile and enigma, solemnity and sanctity. Anthony Cronin bursts these balloons to see more clearly what lies behind. Without moralizing or psychologizing, without pretensions or piety, he uncovers the real Beckett, the way the life was lived, the way the art was made.
Customer Reviews:
Painful.......2006-01-29
I have just finished wading through this weighty tome. It is shameful that this author who evidently knew Beckett intimately but did not learn any from him. He makes it clear to us, how Beckett was able to develop a concise reductive approach to his work in which he reduces sentences to a mere phrase.This book need editing dramatically. Cronin waffles for pages and pages about the most tangential issues barely relavent to Beckett's life.On occassion, conjecting as what Beckett may be thinking or not. This goes on for two thirds of his book and then he cuts short the most active period of Beckett's life. A moment that Cronin has the most resources availble to him with documents and personnel. Beckett was a master of language this author should read him.
Exhaustively researched but never exhausting to read.......2005-01-16
If you seek to understand how a product of the Irish Protestant middle class a century ago managed at an early age to overthrown any certainty brought about by such an upbringing, Cronin offers surmises to this and hundreds of other puzzles in the reticent Foxrock native's life. For a man who so esteemed silence, the impossibility of words to match our inner experiences and their outer raiments, Cronin's herculean cleaning out of the Augean stables, the poring through every scrap penned by Beckett, results in an extraordinarily thorough but never exhausting account ranging six hundred closely printed pages.
As an adopted Dubliner, and as a working writer for fifty years, Cronin adds here to his earlier successes that pondered literary failure, or at least mediocrity, in what passed for bohemian life in the Irish capital of the postwar decade, 1945-55, Dead as Doornails, and in his life of Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O Nolan, No Laughing Matter. Both of these have been reissued recently, and I recommend them to readers curious about how talent can drown its sorrows in too much whisky and its potential in too much talk with too little discipline. While this pair illustrates many anecdotes riotously rendered, the cumulative effect of the two accounts makes for sobering cautionary tales, and how the ghost of Joyce lingered long over last century.
How Beckett managed to extricate himself from the early dominance of Joyce when the two met and depended upon each other however fleetingly in Paris makes for engrossing storytelling. What I noted most of all was how Cronin, through scouring Beckett's records, depicts an author amazingly crippled by maladies mostly psychosomatic, by imagined fears, by phobias befitting indeed his future characters. It takes until 1950 or so for this author, now in his mid-forties, to begin to enter into the period, after `the long siege in the room,' where he could come out of his shell and wrestle with his demons. Having fought, at first for the French Resistance (if his rather circumspect accomplishments fell less than dazzlingly in the Hollywood sense, his danger was no less real and the fate of his comrades no less fatal) and then against his interior desolation, he only then could become, well into middle age, the leader of the avant-garde we know him as, the creator of Godot and Endgame, Krapp and Malone, Molloy and Worm, Winnie and Gogo.
In this brief overview of Cronin's tome, no quotes. But, for anyone needing an excellent précis of what Beckett achieved, chapters 23 and 24 in my estimation serve as a thoughtful and by no means uncritical survey of how Beckett set up scaffolds, erected his plots, and then demolished as much of the structure as the work could stand and still survive.
Of course, his later rather dead-end prose such as How It Is and his tinier plays, or dramaticules, produced as the 1960s and 70s found him caught within the expectations of comedians, scholars, analysts, and audiences, the productions shrank as he seemingly had less to say. As Beckett, at the start of his career, noted of Joyce, the elder Irishman strove to cram the whole of existence into the written word, while his successor sought to eliminate as much of the words and still capture the whole of the same human condition. Two contrasting approaches, intersected by the love of language, the compulsion to manufacture it, and the doubt in any higher purpose than that of the artist driven to create and depict and narrate.
Cronin's energy never flags. I happily measured how well he paces his own story. Godot appears only about 2/3 of the way through, and Cronin never stints on the earlier, more embarrassing malingering of the younger Beckett that presaged his rise to fame and irritated his naturally reclusive nature. His generousity, often remarked upon by those who knew and/or studied him, left many in his debt. Winning the Nobel Prize in 1969, he escaped on an extended holiday and gave away the prize money to a list of deserving up-and-coming writers. One bought a sports car with her windfall.
Cronin, as one who knew and at least once offended Beckett, offers a counterpart to Damned by Fame, which appeared (as biographers often find) immediately prior to his own volume in 1996. James Knowlson, the keeper of the Beckett archive at the University of Reading (where a year's concentration and cash can earn you a MA in Beckett Studies), brought out the authorised biography, with more of the typical trajectory beloved by screenwriters, with Beckett's earlier, more derivatively jaunty, Joycean, or jejune scribblings preparing the way for a blossoming into challenging, disturbing, and, yes, humourous sketches of frailty, despair, and hope.
For Cronin, Beckett's less a secular saint than a hypochondriacal mum's boy who, after coddling and a preparation for respectability, lived the life of the Irish exile (who kept decamping to London and even Dublin often enough) and finally had to grow up, support himself, and push his resources to plumb the darkness within. Out of this, he made stunningly evocative prose, for my tastes some of the best in the 20th century in English, full of cadences that, in the restricted French that he chose so as to limit himself to a harsher diet than that afforded the luxuriant Hiberno-English consumer, ghosted Irishisms, summoned English at its best, and shone through French.
Getting to Know Him.......2003-05-27
A careful, highly readable and sometimes very amusing account of the life of the Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director and sports enthusiast. This gives a nuanced and sensitive account of the Irish background from which Beckett at first painfully extracted himself to a new life in France, but which he was always attached to sentimentally and creatively, never being too busy to meet with a young writer from Ireland, or to drink with old Irish friends and wax nostalgic about the Liffey. This book, while generally very admiring (Cronin has no time for the last novel), is actually more discerning and knowledgeable about Beckett's affairs emotional, literary and dramatic, especially in the later years of his career when Cronin was one of the first to write about him at length in the TLS and elsewhere, as well as to meet him and ask questions such as, "Krapp seems to think he had the possibility of happiness...?" To which Beckett calmly replied, "That doesn't mean he did though, does it?"
You get a fair sense of the man and his times, and a more modulated sense of his slow climb to success, even after "Waiting for Godot" made his name. Never has fame seemed less romantic. Cronin is that best of acquaintance-biographers - no fool, but not an assassin either. Fun as well as thorough. I can't think what will come to light to make a better biography possible.
A highly readable book: a fascinating, mysterious genius.......2000-01-13
For a pretty fat bio, I found this a surprisingly easy and swift read. Cronin, who certainly knows the lay of the land, the type of people, and even some of the actual folks Beckett knew, seems a fair and judicious biographer. I found the book most useful in charting Beckett's development as an artist from the callow "knowingness" of his early novels and poems to the wry despair of his mature work. One is impressed both by Beckett's inconsistent touchiness about the handling of his work by adapters, and by his quiet generosity with near strangers as well as friends. Cronin includes plenty of delightful trivia, from quotes ("I am not a philosopher; one can only speak of what is in front of one and that is simply a mess") to the fact that Beckett always accented the first syllable of Godot.
A valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist.......1999-08-24
This is a valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist. The slow and unconventional evolution of Beckett's art is well described. This biography is, I feel, honest [in as much as any biography can be such] and does not mythologize. Sad that in Beckett's last days he appeared to be consumed with remorse.
Book Description
Theo Angelopoulos is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive contemporary filmmakers and a highly idiosyncratic film stylist. His work, from the early 1970s to The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist, The Suspended Step of the Stalk and the recent Cannes prize-winner Ulysses' Gaze, demonstrates a unique sensibility and a preoccupation with form (notably, the long take, space, and time) and with content, particularly Greek politics and history, and notions of the journey, border-crossing, and exile. This new collection of essays surveys his entire cinematic output and presents a discussion of his major films, themes, and concerns. The contributors argue that Angelopoulos' sustained oeuvre has kept alive the tradition of postwar modernism--the cinema of Antonioni, Jancso, and Ozu--in the largely hostile environment of the 1980s and 1990s. A major work for students and researchers on contemporary European film.
Average customer rating:
- Watered down analysis of a fascinating film maker
- Watered down analysis of a fascinating film maker
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Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (Contemporary Film and Television Series)
Peter C. Lutze
Manufacturer: Wayne State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0814326560 |
Customer Reviews:
Watered down analysis of a fascinating film maker.......2003-06-29
I am quite familiar with the works of Kluge, and was both intrigued and excited to read this book. I came away from my reading of this book disappointed and thinking that I could have written this in less than one day. Unfortunately, and I regret that I have to say this because too little is written on interesting people like Kluge, there is nothing new here to those of us who know Kluge's work and something about his history in German cinema and public television. This is probably a fine book for freshman to consult in an introduction to german cinema class, but I was under the impression that this book was in the series because it was aimed at a professional or graduate school audience. Sorry I can't be more positive, but I wouldn't spend my money on this one.
Watered down analysis of a fascinating film maker.......2003-06-29
I am quite familiar with the works of Kluge, and was both intrigued and excited to read this book. I came away from my reading of this book disappointed and thinking that I could have written this in less than one day. Unfortunately, and I regret that I have to say this because too little is written on interesting people like Kluge, there is nothing new here to those of us who know Kluge's work and something about his history in German cinema and public television. This is probably a fine book for freshman to consult in an introduction to german cinema class, but I was under the impression that this book was in the series because it was aimed at a professional or graduate school audience. Sorry I can't be more positive, but I wouldn't spend my money on this one.
Average customer rating:
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Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist
S. Mestrovic
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0415095727 |
Book Description
Anthony Giddens is arguably the world's leading sociologist. In this controversial contribution to the Giddens debate, Stjepan Mestrovic takes up and criticizes the major themes of his work - particularly the concept of 'high modernity' as opposed to 'postmodernity' and his attempted construction of a 'synthetic' tradition based on human agency and structure. Testing Giddens' theories against what is happening in the real world from genocide in Africa to near secession in Quebec, Mestrovic discerns in the construction of synthetic traditions not the promise of freedom held out by Giddens but rather the ominous potential for new forms of totalitarian control.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 1207 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: In search of a great modernist: do Proust's final days illuminate his novel?(Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris)(Book review)
Author: Susan Rubin Suleiman
Publication:
American Scholar (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 75
Issue: 3
Page: 129(3)
Article Type: Book review
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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Cineaste, published by Cineaste Publishers, Inc. on March 22, 1997. The length of the article is 1815 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos.(Review)
Author: Cleo Cacoulidis
Publication:
Cineaste (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 1997
Publisher: Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
Volume: 23
Issue: 2
Page: 55(2)
Article Type: Book Review
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Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism
Yoshiki Tajiri
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 0230008178
Release Date: 2007-01-23 |
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The History of the English Organ
Stephen Bicknell
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Piano
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ASIN: 0521550262 |
Book Description
This highly readable and lavishly illustrated work describes the history of organs built in England from AD 900 to the present day. The author's experience in organ building gives the account all the benefits of first-hand experience. Stephen Bicknell also draws on new research and includes many important discoveries made during the past twenty years. Written in an elegant, entertaining and informed manner, the book is a vital and much-needed addition to current organ literature.
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The History of the English Organ. (book reviews): An article from: Notes
Benjamin Van Wye
Manufacturer: Music Library Association, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
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ASIN: B00098BO4O
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on September 1, 1998. The length of the article is 587 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The History of the English Organ. (book reviews)
Author: Benjamin Van Wye
Publication:
Notes (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1998
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v55
Issue: n1
Page: p91(1)
Article Type: Book Review
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Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought
The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration
Samuel Beckett
