Jesse Hilson’s Reviews > Samuel Beckett > Status Update

Post-war success for Samuel Beckett, his plays. And this vexed him badly, too.

Made it through World War Two. Beckett downplaying his considerable activities with the French Resistance as “Boy Scout stuff.”

Skipped over the chapter on Murphy because I assumed it would spoil the novel which I haven’t read yet. Boy, Beckett was a mess. He traveled back and forth to European cities plus London so many times, when he was skint. Unemployable and drunken, terrible relationships with his family, a weirdo apparently w/ everyone else

It’s interesting but Beckett is a gloomy bastard, not a lot of fun to be around, and Bair’s analysis and writing about Beckett’s early works sometimes seems to fall short, maybe because there was little to no “there, there”