Dream of Fair to Middling Women

As the story begins, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba - 'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' (New Yorker). Beckett’s first ‘literary landmark’ (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua – a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba – ‘wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final “relapse into Dublin”’ (New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.

• | Author: Samuel Beckett
• | Publisher: Faber & Faber
• | Publication Date: Apr 02, 2020
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9780571358052
• | ISBN-10: 0571358055