Reviews of The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1, 1929–1940
The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1, 1929–1940 Series: The Letters of Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld/ Lois More Overbeck
‘In many of the letters in this volume, especially those to Nuala Costello, with whom he seems to have thought himself in love, Beckett is often brilliant, nearly always funny, but we feel, as we do with many of the early stories and poems, that he is trying too hard, that he is simultaneously showing off and protecting himself. Now and then, we hear a voice we recognize as the authentic Beckett. This happens either when he trusts his interlocutor (as he does McGreevy) and so is prepared to confess his confusions, or when he writes in a language not his own, as in the letters to Morris Sinclair and Axel Kaun, or when suffering breaks down the barriers, as at the end of the letter to McGreevy announcing his father’s death: “I can’t write about him. I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him”
from
More here:
Steve Mitchelmore at This Space
Anthony Lane at The New Yorker
Dwight Garner at The New York Times
