Word: beckett
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...Many modern novelists, given the temper of the times, have viewed the world as a grim, inhuman place, and that view has paralyzed them as much as it has inspired them. Practitioners of the Literature of Impotence and Exhaustion, for example, have tended to become impotent and exhausted. Samuel Beckett, unable even to bewail further the impossibility of expression, has written nothing of significance for twenty years now, except for a few anguished fragments (his publishers have taken to offering new tran-slations of old, discarded texts). John Barth, last he was heard from, was searching for a literary mode...
Jerzy Kosinski has never been in the mainstream of this particular movement, and he manages to keep writing, evidently comfortable with his very characteristic narrative style. Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski writes a clean, workmanlike English: fluid enough, if not exactly mellifluous, but always steely and gray. Beckett, who also chose to write in a language not his own, did so, in an odd way, for the discipline; Kosinski has said that English, for him, is a language of bare bones, lacking the richness of a lifetime of connotations. At the end of The Devil Tree, Kosinski's last...
There is some perversity in using language to desiccate, rather than to enrich, and some danger. The risk Kosinski takes is like the risk Beckett and Barth took; the barrenness of his words and of his landscapes threaten to consume the whole. A Literature of Desolation that engenders only desolate novels is, to say the least, self-defeating...
Krapp's Last Tape, Play, Come and Go, and other short plays by Samuel Beckett are being performed at the Newbury St. Theater, Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St. in Boston, tonight and tomorrow at 8. Tickets...
...fiction of Samuel Beckett, a clearly evolving narrative line has been sacrificed in favor of a radically fragmented, almost pulverized texture. Directional melodies and harmonies have been replaced by sudden bursts of sound, explosions of something not quite rational or explicable...