I enjoyed this book so much that I am currently writing a paper on it. I'm exploring some Beckett's amazing treatment of the conciousness and the movement that is inherent in each of the pieces. I'm also touching on the pieces as they relate to phenomenology and the study of experience expressed in conciousness. Unfortunantly, I need to know how this collection was compiled, when, and under whose authorization. This is very important to my thesis. If any one knows where I could find that information I would appreciate a response.

There are few short stories that leave one feeling satisfied. Fortunately, this is not one of them.

It has been ages since I read it, but I cannot help but recall the feeling it evoked.

All in all, love fails us. All in all, we fail to tell well of the process by which it fails us. Beckett fails better than us all. God bless you, Sam, for always pointing us toward the unutterable. The other stories I do not remember. But "First Love" alone is worth all these fellows ask of you.

Krapp's Last Tape is a humorous one act play involving a man named Krapp. Recording his life, he looks back on recorded spools of his life. The recorded spools talk about previous spools years earlier. Always with the same attitude towards just about everything, Krapp does not change as he ages. His life is a circular cycle as opposed to a straight line. He is figuratively constipated. Fun to read and entertaining.

Although it is probably his most conventional play, this is my favourite Beckett work. It is as bleak as Godot and despairing as End Game. It is also as funny as these tragicomic masterpieces. What is different here is that Krapp is less of a pawn, or fragment of an idea than the other characters, we are given access to his past, to his fundamental ambivalences (the desire for solitude and companionship), his apprehension of beauty. It is remarkable to see on stage a whole series of seperate selves contained in the one entity Krapp. The play is depressingly, inevitable circular, and the sense of repetition (note the extraordinary variations on light and darkness) throughout the stories the younger Krapp tells is not continuity, but an awareness of death, failure, old age. The play is also a comment on the nature of theatre going itself: in listening to his old tapes, Krapp becomes, as well as an actor, an audience, and in interpreting what he hears, a critic. This Shakespearean self-reflexivity only adds to the melancholy of the film's close.

--When my life-routine is in decay only Samuel Beckett can suffice. While the poorest of Beckett's prose offer only that sunken cold-in-the-stomach feeling of literary indigestion (this may after all be the intended effect), the better segments deliver a richer vein of orchestral inflection, a chalk-and-charcoal tone-poetry of sorts, a lush groggy cipher-state dreaming with angst. The 1946 sequence of nouvelles that are the blessing of this collection ("First Love" "The Expelled" "The Calmative" "The End") are especially vital to this reader, which is to say that they reread the best.
--As one progresses through this volume, from the Joycean exuberance of "Assumption" and "Sedendo et Quiescendo", to the ashen zero-time of "Texts for Nothing" and "All Strange Away", to the bleached naked endurance of "Lessness" and "Stirrings Still", Beckett's narration seems to sink further and further into the mud, a breaking down of readerly expectation into a prose-world as dark as what it conceals.
--I recommend this anthology to patient readers in search of their own zero-hour, and as a startling companion-piece to the major novels and plays.

Simply a matter of attaining Dubliners and the Portrait and the Wake, and facing the game's up. This gives you, eventually, Fizzle 7, the pure pivoting word "in its place" (etc., Eliot), the Pope Marcellus Mass of modern letters, for example.

Beckett's drama "What Where" is another example of a disorganized world where the only two certainties are suffering and uncertainty. Ample readings of the terse drama only serves as a catalyst for increased suffering and uncertainty in the reader. It never becomes clear whether the play is a mime, a schizophrenic episode, a parody, or a dream. The drama's brevity leads us scrambling for details that are intentionally omitted. For example, how do the stage directions relate directly to the play? Moreover, who is Bam torturing? Himself? While a deep understaning of "the absurd" and existentialism may help the reader unravel some of the drama's mysteries, such an understaning is unlikely to yield any discernible truth.

Ohio Impromptu is one of those rare plays which brightens your day yet blackens it at the same time. The language is painfully beautiful and is play i would love to see performed. From reading the text there is a warped sense of tension but warmth at the same time. I read this many times upon purchasing it and it has the wonderful ability to paint Mona Lisa style smile across my face each time i do. This is one of my favourite plays, by an excellent author.

Veering dangerously close to self-parody, 'Ohio Impromptu' is probably the most beautiful and least difficult of Beckett's last works. It tells the story of a black-clad Reader who reads a story to a silent black-clad Listener, about a grieving man who has lost his lover, who sends him a man to comfort him, and who does so by reading to him...As a work about loss and grief it is unsurpassed even in Beckett's work, and its description of lonely walks around Paris and Shades visiting from the dead are haunting, while the dutiful formal self-reflexivity does no real damage to the sentimentality.

'Catastrophe' is considered Beckett's only political play (I always thought 'Godot' was pretty political), written in support of Vaclav Havel in the early 80s when he was a jailed dissident playwright. As politics, it is rather obvious and banal, but it also works as a play about the theatre, about the power struggle that is life and the usual 'universal' stuff.

'What Where' is one of the late pattern plays, where four characters perform a mime which is explained by one of them through megaphone. Often taken as another political parable, this time about torture and confession in a system where truth cannot exist, its inspiration in Schubert's song-cycle 'Winterreisse' gives it a more human force.

DAMNED TO FAME: The Life of Samuel Beckett. By James Knowlson. 800 pages. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-80872-2 (hbk).

Although few lives bear looking into too deeply, from an 'Official Biography' of a writer as important as Beckett one expects something better than the mass of distortions, omissions, over and under-emphases, and general slurrings-over that Knowlson offers here in a book that has so many weaknesses it's difficult to know where to begin. There is, in the first place, his almost total suppression of the disastrous effect Beckett's mother had on him; a cold, frigid, and neurotic woman, dominated by notions of class, propriety, decorum, and respectability, who was determined to mold him into her idea of the ideal son who would be respected by Protestant and materialistic upper middle class Dublin society. From Deirdre Bair's more honest account of Beckett's life we learn that he rebelled against this treatment from an early age, and that the psychological torture inflicted upon him by his mother, besides having a lot to do with his flight from Ireland, was ultimately
what was behind his years of emotional misery and repeated bouts of serious physical illness.

But the problem with this book runs deeper, for not only are we not given a fully realized portrait of Beckett's mother, we are not given fully realized portraits of anyone, not even of Beckett himself. Knowlson seems incapable of conveying the essence of character, of making character vivid and memorable, whether through physical description, anecdote, or things they are known to have said. What did it actually feel like to be Beckett as a child growing up in Foxrock? As Portora schoolboy? As Trinity College scholar? As Ecole Normale Superieure lecteur? As friend of Joyce? As struggling writer? As resistance worker? As farm laborer? As, finally, successful and famous? We never really find out. Nor do we find out much about his father, his brother Frank, his long-time companion Suzanne, and his numerous relations, lovers, friends, and personal and professional acquaintances. Many of them crop up constantly in the book, but none of them ever become real. What, for example, was Suzanne, the woman Beckett eventually married, like as a person? What was she like to live with? We never find out.

And there's much more we never find out. Beckett, for example, was enormously interested in the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Why? What were his ideas about Sade? We don't know. Knowlson doesn't tell us. Beckett had a lifelong passion for chess. He is known to have played against opponents as noteworthy as Marcel Duchamp. He even gives us a move-by-move chess game in 'Murphy' and called one of his most important plays 'Endgame.' But what kind of player was Beckett? Did he favor a positional or attacking game? How large was his chess library? Who were his favorite masters? We never find out. Nor are we given transcripts of any of his games. Knowlson is so ignorant of chess that he can even tell us that "Beckett played chess with himself" when what Beckett must obviously have been doing was playing over a master game from one of his books. There is also the matter of Beckett's deep love and respect for animals, a positive trait he seems to have inherited from his mother, and which ought to be evident to even the most superficial reader, but about which Knowlson says nothing, since, like Sade and chess, animals also seem not to be part of Knowlson's mental universe.

Knowlson, in short, gives us no real sense of Beckett and the people around him; ignores many of Beckett's interests and passions; and, most serious of all, fails to explore the single most important formative factor in Beckett's makeup - his extremely complex love-hate relationship with his mother. Throughout his life Beckett suffered horribly from septic and purulent cysts and abscesses which broke out on his neck, in his jaw, palate, and even inside his anus, and which often required surgery and extended periods of convalescence. A steady stream of pus and filth issued from his body (he even entitled some of his poems 'Sanies,' a word which means a bloody and purulent discharge), and it's difficult not to see this, along with the gloom and pessimism which infect his works, as having something to do with the steady stream of rage and hatred that flowed into him from his mother. But all this is a bit too much for Knowlson. He prefers to ignore it. All that he has to offer is a Whitewashed and Sanitized Sam. Anyone who wants a more honest and lively account would be far better off reading Bair:

SAMUEL BECKETT: A Biography. By Deirdre Bair. 736 pages. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. ISBN 0-15-179256-9 (hbk).

for Pete's sake.... Boo Hiss. If you know so much about him that you can make the assertions that you make... why didn't you do the job? I haven't finished the book yet, but I am enjoying it. Knowlson, obviously isn;t a professional biographer per say, but he at least brings many years of critical insight into the subject. And needless to say, if you want a "psychological" study, then we'll have to turn to someone else about his mother problems. Sometimes professional biographers aren't the best to unravel all the complexities of a man like Beckett.

It's too easy, I think, to criticize an authorized biography as being hagiography. I didn't find that Damned to Fame suffered from particular whitewashing, but then I wasn't reading it with a particular need to see SB picked apart in a personally critical way.

Knowlson was a close personal friend of Beckett's-- a fact which he doesn't try to hide in his treatment. And as such he has access to letters and papers of which other would-be Beckett biographers could only dream. And as a friend, I found that he left the focus in the place that Beckett would have wanted it-- on the work itself, on the vision, on the *writing*.

Which is not to say that he neglects Beckett as a person, it's just to say that Beckett was a deeply private person and I found that Knowlson did an excellent job of balancing the privacy so dear to the subject with discussing what the reader needs to know to understand the artist.

For a casual reader, Damned to Fame might even be *too* exhaustive. I appreciated it, however. Particularly appreciated all the references to what Beckett was reading at various points in his life and I as well appreciated the copious notes and bibliography provided at the end of the book.

Some advice: although this book contains some of the most astonishing plays ever written, I wouldn't read them all in one go. If you do, doubts might seem to creep in. About how Beckett doesn't really have all that much to say, and became increasingly mannered in his attempts to say it. That his work is really just three variations on basic forms - the Godotesque double act; the old man or woman looking back over a (generally stunted) life; and the pattern plays/mimes. You'll certainly want to rush and read something silly just for a breath of air; there's not much of the vaunted Beckett humour here.

Nevertheless, the collection brims with Beckett's best work - the remorselessly inventive radio play, 'All That Fall'; the sublimely tragic comedy, 'Krapp's Last Tape'; the infernal farce, 'Play'; the deconstruction of nostalgia, 'That Time'; the chamber poignancy of 'Ohio Impromptu'; the great theatrical experiments, 'Footfalls', 'What Where', 'Not I', 'Rockaby', which pushed the language of theatre way past its limits, undermining its boasts of 'live performance' and the functionality of language - in these texts, 'meaning', if there is such a thing, may reside in the stage directions.

Beckett's shorter may shock a new reader to Beckett's works. If you are looking for something that tells an interesting story, you will not enjoy his plays. I can understand why previous reviewers feel that that there is not content in his plays. But the intention of much of his works is to provide meaning through the emptiness. Beckett is a truly great minimalist writer: some of the plays in this volume lack even speech, relying soley on stage directions. The empty, cyclic nature of human life is central to his world view. Beckett makes his readers linger on questions long after they finish reading. His writing is marked by brevity, but is nevertheless succinct.

Many of the plays in this collection move me greatly-the vision lost in "Krapp's Last Tape", the past's deafening roar(or, dying flame) in "Embers", examinations of self-awareness,memory, and one's ability to express these in "Not I", "That Time" & "A Piece of Monologue", the sadly charming lost Ireland of "All That Fall", the image of a reader literally staring an image of himself in the face while reading a memoir-like first person narative in "Ohio Impromtu". This book contains Beckett's works for theatre, radio, television, film, mimes, which may explain it's seeming unstageability to other readers. Beckett viewed his dramatic works as his break from the serious writing of his prose early in his career("Waiting for Godot" was written as a break between Molloy & Malone Dies), but as he moved on toward silence, Beckett's theatre became the medium in which he achiveed his greatest acclaim & fame. The late dramas of "That Time" & "A Piece of Monologue" anticipate the self-searching confessional style & subject of the Nohow On 'novels', and present investigations of memory, responsibility, self-identity, and expressionability that are moving and profound, as well as being intimate portraits of the individual alone. All of the plays in this collection are powerful documents of intimate moments that question not only what we call theatre but also question how we understand, experience, question & represent our "self"s, our pasts...our "moments". I can think of no other writer who portrays true moments of aloneness, moments of unself-representing(even as these are represented as farcical) so honestly. Depressing? No, these plays are life affirming, in all its breathes and cries, its cycles of memorializing and willful forgetting, its fabrications and its confessional, the blinding light and frightening countenance of the other's gaze, the silence of another's absence. Intimate moments are diverse, and they are represented here without a flinch in all their breadth. No symbols where none intended, Beckett said elsewhere, but are there not other means for expressive art than symbols? "There was a time when I asked myself, What is it./There were times I answered, It's the outing./ Two outings./ Then the return./ Where?/ To the village./ To the inn./ Two outings, then at last the return, to the village, to the inn, by the only road that leads there./ An image, like any other./ But I don't answer any more./ I open"(Cascando). Herein, the opening that constitutes a search for other roads to there.

I'll say this very simply: If you are interested in existentialism, philosophy in general, or the theater of the absurd, read this book. If you are looking for a book with any plot or deeper meaning, look elsewhere. If you choose to read this, a word of warning: though it is a short book, it is the opposite of a page-turner. You can barely finish a page before you have to put the book down and think about something else. Also, it will most likely depress you.

Waiting For Godot is certainly an interesting and unique drama. The sparse presentation and sense of hopelessness underlying this tragicomedy appeals to the existentialist in me, but I was not moved or stimulated enough to grant this work five stars. I daresay that the effect of Waiting For Godot is much more impactful and effective when performed on stage than it is when read, particularly in terms of the lyrical dialogue that often comes to the fore. To a large degree, this is a play about nothingness (which is quite different from a play about nothing), so I find it rather strange that it is hailed as one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century. This kind of thing usually suits my tastes but few others'. There's no fantabulous show designed to bedazzle the ideas of the spectator, just a country road and a tree set during the evening hours. The cast numbers five individuals: the two unfortunates Estragon and Vladimir, Pozzo and his "slave" Lucky, and a little boy (possibly, in the context of the play, two little boys who may or may not look exactly alike). Estragon and Vladimir spend their time examining their hats, worrying with their boots, thinking about separating or just hanging themselves to be done with it all, and of course waiting for Godot. I don't want to ruin this for anyone, but you never meet or find out if this mysterious Godot even exists. Some critical thinkers (along with a few of your basic pseudo-intellectual crackpots) seem compelled to interpret Godot as a God-figure, but I see no reason to make that speculative leap.

Estragon and Godot really have no sense of who, where, and when they are, as becomes clear in their interactions with the wealthy passerby Pozzo and Lucky, his personal servant who is as much a trained mule as he is a man. Lucky can "think," though, and you'd better grab a seat and hold on when he gets started. After the first night comes, Estragon and Vladimir return to the same spot to once again wait on Godot, and once again Pozzo, now suddenly blind, and Lucky return. No one seems to remember anything much about the others or of the previous day with the exception of Vladimir, and the interaction between the four major characters certainly introduces some comedy, albeit of a tragic, resigned sort. The comedy actually makes the drama more tragic, so its classification as a tragicomedy in two acts is pretty apt. I don't see a lot of hope revealed here, although others seem to. Life is simply meaningless is the message I get most clearly out of it, so the only hope I perceive comes in the form of waiting for something that may or may not happen while doing nothing yourself to make anything happen. We are all waiting for something, I suppose, but such a vivid portrayal of the utter futility of such behavior strikes me as more depressing than inspiring. This drama really deserves multiple reads in order for its true essence to work its way closer to the surface; it may well be, I freely admit, that I have yet to spot whatever essence the play intends to reveal to me. I won't deny Waiting For Godot is a landmark drama, and I fear this review has done it very little justice, but I consider the act of writing it a victory of sorts over the useless practice of waiting for Godot to come and explain everything to me and take care of all my questions and troubles.

This is another boonie dog review by Wolfie and Kansas. The play "Waiting for Godot", allegedly by the human playwright Samuel Beckett, fills a major void in the literary canon.

Some humans find this play perplexing. To us dogs, much of the hidden meaning of "Waiting for Godot" is as clear as the odor of day-old road kill. The lead characters, Didi and Gogo, laze around by the side of a country road, waiting for whatever, yipping and yapping about whatever comes to mind, gnawing on chicken bones, and sniffing boots. Didi and Gogo are boonie dogs, like us! The enslaved character Lucky is a domestic "pet", housebroken and "fixed" (i.e., broken). Pozzo is a parody of a not atypical pompous human self-proclaimed "pet owner". The remaining character, the boy, may represent the quintessential, but often somewhat clueless, noncanine animal companion of primate derivation, Lassie's Timmy. The sole prop in the play's scenery, a tree, has obvious uses and significance for canines.

Godot could be God, or an alpha mail who will lead a raid on a restaurant dumpster, a bitch in heat, a human bearing Milk Bones, or a noisy truck to be chased. Godot represents all of the things that we wait for when we hang out by the roadside.

Once the reader understands the true meaning of "Waiting for Godot", it is clear that this play was written by a dog. Just as women used to publish under male pseudonyms, and blacklisted screenwriters used fronts, so the anonymous canine who wrote this play had to put a human playwright's name on his or her work in order to have it staged and accepted. We believe that plays should be seen, heard and smelled, rather than read. However, until "Waiting for Godot" is properly staged with a canine cast, it can perhaps best be enjoyed by reading the script.

Dogs have already produced classic poetry, such as Skipper's "Complacencies of the Fenced Yard", published in "Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs". Now we know a dog has written "Waiting for Godot", a classic play. This only heightens our aniticipation as we await the coming of the great canine novel.

What the audience is met with is full-blown confusion. Thefirst scene opens with a brief tableau, a frozen frame depicting thetwo main character Clov and Hamm, the latter confined to a chair and the other dressed in shabby clothes, face expressionless, standing and looking into the audience. Beckett intends for the audience to be shocked and to be left unrestful. Beckett wrote Endgame to illustrate human suffering and the meaninglessness of routine. People who are not courageous enough to experience anything other than the monotony of life, people who lack any imagination and creativity. It is the extent of unfeelingness and total oblivion of emotions that detaches the characters in the play from what we may perceive as "realistic". On the first reading, one may be put off entirely by the repetitive questions and actions but with a closer second reading, the quality of Beckett's dramatic technique becomes palpable. Beckett's ingenuity of writing a play devoid of a plot shows that a dramamtist is not always bound to plot as most people assume. Anyway, here is a quote from the play to consider: "All life long the same questions, the same answers..........have you not have enough of this..this...this thing?"

Ultimately more pessimistic that Beckett's "Godot," in many ways "Endgame" can be seen as a much fuller and altogether more haunting piece of theater. Beckett tirelessly explores our greatest fears--isolation, mortality, loss of idealism--until the play becomes a barebones expression of what it means to be human in the existential uncertainty of the post WWII western world. It is a critique of our own social values; we see ourselves, in our most potent form, in its characters.

This is a Beckett play; no one else could write it. Sometimes uneven in language, inconsistent in style, such conventions do not matter here. Like "Godot" however, occasionally Beckett overplays his message, and that at points the play is too cryptic to follow, especially when read.

However, Beckett's vision in undeniably brilliant; we see ourselves in "Endgame" and we are inconsolably frightened by what we see.

Endgame is a beautiful example of why Samuel Beckett is hailed as one of the greatest playwrites of the 20th century. Beckett, one of the most profound exestentialists of all time is famous for not only his brilliant dialouge (so real and beautiful) but also for his amazing characters. Endgame is a perfect example of this.

If you are considering reading this play, or any other by Beckett, I suggest you prepare yourself. Do not expect Death of a Salesman here, because you are going to get the exact opposite. Without proper analyzation, Endgame appears to have no real meaning or plot so to speak. Baisically, it is about two men struggling to get along with each other, one whom had raised the other since birth. The entire one act play is based on their rising conflict with each other, and on the developement of both the major characters, Clov and Hamm. Although this may seem to you as not much to base a play on, the art of exestencialism is based on human emotion and existence. Therefore, it is the perfect place to describe a character in depth. If you are still having difficulty understanding the meaning of Endgame, analyze it as a feud between an aging father and a teenage son. The aging father yells and is tired of the teen, but still wants to hold him. The teen is tired of the father, but still listens to him until a certain line is crossed. That line will become clearer in Endgame by Samuell Beckett, a true masterpiece, which I highly recommend.

Because you wait and wait, and then three don't turn up at once.

I just received this book and haven't read it yet. It looks quite good.

HOWEVER! because I read the description too quickly, and because I was misled by the other reader reviews, I thought that the actual text of the play was here, in both languages, in addition to a critical apparatus. Not so!

All of the other reader reviews are about Beckett's play itself, which is not part of this book!

I discovered 'Waiting for Godot' when I was 15 and it is still my favourite play 15 years later. It deals with human frailty, and shouts out all the big questions like, 'Why are we here'? Beckett asks us to confront one the the bigest concerns ever faced by human kind and that is 'Is there such a thing as eternity, and if there is what is it's purpose'? Every culture has myths and mechanisms which seek to understand the eternal. The Egyptians tried to conquer eternity with their pryamids and I belive that 'Waiting For Godot' is the modern equivalent. Waiting for Godot is touching and humerous at times, but also filled with bitter irony. It is a play that speaks for human kind and it lets us know that we are not alone with our frailty. I can not reccomend this play enough. Samuel Beckett certainly deserved to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Unnameable explains himself as aporetic [being unable to act] and ephectic [being unable to make a decision]. From 1929, in "Che Sciagura", to 1989 Beckett's prose becomes more and more aporetic. From "Lessness" in 1970 to Ill Seen Ill Said in 1981 to Worstword Ho in 1983, aporia dominates the prose style and the thematic content. All of Beckett's tiny, bizarre stories - "Imagination Dead Imagine" [one paragraph], "The Lost Ones", "Enough", "Ping", Fizzles [eight one-paragraph stories] - they all contain catatonic characters, paralyzed by mental ambivalence. See The Insanity of Samuel Beckett's Art on Amazon.com.

While Beckett's works certainly contain their share of angst, there is more to his work than that, as this collection reminds us. The last work in this collection is a nonfiction essay that Beckett wrote for Irish radio just after World War II called "The Capital of the Ruins." Beckett's subject was a field hospital in the French town of St. Lo that Irish citizens had helped to staff (and where he himself had worked as an interpreter). While the prose is unmistakably Beckett (particularly the self-deprecating humor--at one point he refers to the essay as a "circumlocution"), the optimism of trying to convince his people that they had helped their fellow human beings survive a terrible war more easily is not what we expect from him. Also typical is a wonderful Biblical allusion to the Book of Isaiah and its great swords-and-plowshares metaphor, which he cleverly adapts to modern times. There is a lot of wonderful fiction in this volume (my favorite is "The Cliff," a short meditation, possibly on a preserved skull), but the non-fiction is not to be neglected, and reveals a side of this writer not often seen or considered.

Essential for anyone interested in 20th century prose. Complements the holes in language the novels & plays sought to expose. Beckett knew everything there is to know about form. These shorts move between poetry and prose. See especially the series "First Love", "The Expelled", "The Calmative", "The End"- the bridge from Watt to Molloy. The blackened page of Beckett's paragraph-less mummur is not for everyone, but once you hear his rhythm, it is not easily forgotten.