Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91149 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 536 pages

Customer Reviews

A great collector's edition
This is the second in a collection of four hardbacked novels celebrating the works of Samuel Beckett. Bar a handful of omissions it is a comprehensive collection; this book contains the writer's novels. The book is beautifully presented and has a really solid feel. The price is competitive and the contents carefully detailed and coherent. Would make a great gift; I bought a set for a colleague who was leaving our school and he, as a long time Beckett fan, was made up. Highly recommended and a great price.

I can't go on, I'll go on.
Sadly, when I first read Beckett I was a mildly pretentious English Literature undergraduate, attracted by a writer who I thought of as bleak and intense.

Revisiting him years later, I'm amazed by how often I laughed aloud while ploughing through this volume. In these days of "LOL" being used at the end of every sentence by anyone who thinks they've typed some sort of witticism, it's a thing of wonder to find oneself actually guffawing while reading such a brilliantly funny, yet substantial writer.

I think it's telling that I found the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable) hard-going when I was 18. I know full well why: I was trying to be too clever by half in my reading of it. Instead of being academic about it, read them as though you're reading them aloud, and if you can, with an Irish accent - it's then that the rhythms of the prose really come alive. These are wonderfully entertaining works that ruminate cheekily on the futility of human existence.

It's unfortunate that the box set of the four volumes of the Grove Centenary Edition is now unavailable; it's a lovely thing and beautifully presented. But really, you can't get better value than this. Amazon want just over eleven quid for a fine hardback edition of four novels by one of the great writers in English. Click the big yellow button. Go on.

This is Volume 2.
Firstly, this is volume 2 of this series, the closest thing to a Collected Works of Samuel Beckett that could be done in English. All it's missing in Dream of Dair to Middling Woman and Eleutheria, as the editor points out. I ordered all 4 volumes together (because the boxed set is unavailable for some reason) and have not been disappointed. Samuel Beckett, I already knew, is an amazing writer. I had read all his plays and am currently awe-struck by his novelsIf you've read anything by him and still have it stuck in your head, these are a great buy, and an even better read. Anyone who likes James Joyce, Franz Kafka or Albert Camus should definitely read a bit of Beckett.