Fifteen Eighty Four

Robin Moroney’s March 12 review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett has a very cool wrap-up:

“As enjoyable as it is to have such additions to the Beckett canon, it is disconcerting how haunted these letters are by the Beckett who might have been: the one who listened to his instincts and his relatives and tried another line of work. He applies to teach in Cape Town, to work at the National Gallery, and to study film with Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, with (luckily for us) no luck. He considers joining his brother in the family quantity-surveying business. Perhaps the most terrifying sentence in the book is, “I thought of apprenticing myself to some advertising firm in London.”

Beckett the ad man is a thought to behold. The 20th century would have felt quite different if the narrator of “The Unnameable” hadn’t been able to utter “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” but the Energizer Bunny had.

The full review >>