Dream of Fair to Middling Women
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Beckett's first 'literary landmark' (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. 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"' (New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.
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‰ЫПLet it be said now without further ado, they were just pleasantly drunk. That is, we think, being more, becoming and unbecoming less, than usual. Not so far gone as to be rapt in that disgraceful apotheosis of immediacy from which yesterday and to-morrow are banished and the off dawn into the mire of coma taken; and yet at the same time phony and contrapanic-stuck, than usual. Not, needless to say, melting in that shameless ecstasy of disintegration justly quenched in the mire and pain of reassemblage; no, immediacy, it was merely an innocent and agreeable awareness of being and that less clocklaboriously than was their habit. Pleasantly drunk.‰Ыќ ‰ЫУ And so with this you see a sample of what I had to deal with, reading this book, not really understanding most of it.
And Smeraldina-Rima, upon hearing big words: ‰ЫПWhat‰ЫЄs that? Something to eat?‰Ыќ
