A welcome exercise in literary archaeology, especially for students of modernism and 20th-century literature.
A long-forgotten addendum to More Pricks Than Kicks, restored 81 years after Beckett (The Complete Short Prose, 1996, etc.) wrote this strange, allusive tale.
As Mark Nixon (Univ. of Reading) notes in his introduction, when Chatto & Windus took on More Pricks—a slim book of interrelated stories about a goofball named Belacqua—its editor suggested that an 11th story be added to it, if for no other reason than to bulk it out. He almost certainly didn’t reckon on what Beckett delivered, a Joyce-lite reimagination of Dante’s descent that was full of subtle shaggy dog–isms, with plenty of sexual suggestion: “Can you think of any thing existing, God or Gonococcus, lower than the creature, his three score years and ten of hot cockles?” One sympathizes with Chatto’s decision to pass, though one also wonders if John Lennon somehow got hold of the manuscript before penning A Spaniard in the Works; especially the very last page, with its resonant line, “[s]o the submarine departed, very cross indeed.” Beckett’s sardonic surrealism, so Anna Livia Plurabelle–istic, is on full display here, and whatever its effects on the publisher, it’s clear he was having a good time setting his nightmarish scenario in motion, having killed off its main character earlier and now being forced to come up with some plausible reason to place him once again “up and about in the dust of the world.” But never mind plausibility: Read this as an extended prose poem, an exercise in beautiful language and striking image (“Belacqua, crazed with compassion, rolling about in a maffick of grief in his cauldron or basket, felt it incumbent upon him to hazard a kind word”), and this short text finds its rightful place among Beckett’s novels, plays and poems.
A welcome exercise in literary archaeology, especially for students of modernism and 20th-century literature.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-9407-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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