Samuel Beckett

An Exercise in Redemption: On Deirdre Bair’s “Parisian Lives”

November 14, 2019   •   By Sophie Madeline Dess

AWARD-WINNING WRITER Deirdre Bair likes to call herself an “accidental biographer.” Apparently, she “had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it.” One is inclined to call this a “happy” accident since the Beckett bio won the National Book Award in 1981 and started Bair on a prolific career. However, given the mortifying and fury-eliciting anecdotes laced throughout her new memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, happy is not the word that comes most readily to mind.

 

Fleur Jaeggy

The Single Most Pristine Certainty: Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas Bernhard, and the Fact of Death

October 3, 2019   •   By Sophie Madeline Dess

WE ARE TOLD that novels are meant to teach us something. It’s as if the objective goals in life can be projected outward in the imagination, and novels are there to help us discern our trajectory through this projection. Each character’s choice marks the carving of a particular path, by which we might judge our own. There are some out there (Malcolm Cowley, among others) who believe that even an author’s choice to use a “hard” word as opposed to an “easy” word is an inherently moral decision — one that, we can assume — impacts the reader’s engagement with the text on moral terms (whatever those might be). It is tired news now to note that even when novels are not explicitly instructional, they can still be read as guides, with subtle ethical or behavioral insinuations. One can walk away from Madame Bovary — a novel in which moral and aesthetic tropes are continuously undermined — still having “learned” something: do not — you impressionable fool! — be brainwashed by popular, romantic novels, lest you run the risk of becoming the vulnerable, reckless, impulsive, naïve eponymous Emma.