Dream of Fair to middling Women

Samuel Beckett's "high energy and boisterously libidinous"(Booklist) first novel--a wonderfully savory introduction to the NobelPrize-winning author during this centenary year.Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26-year-old Beckett was poor andstruggling, Dream of Fair to middling Women offers a rare and revealingportrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call thenovel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When hesubmitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, tooscandalous, or too risky, and it was never published during his lifetime. In the novel, Belacqua--a young version of Molloy, whose love is dividedbetween two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba--"wrestles with his lustsand learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapseinto Dublin'" (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influencedby Joyce, Dream of Fair to middling Women is a work of extraordinaryvirtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language thatmark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that,like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.