Dream of Fair to Middling Women
A Novel
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Dream of Fair to Middling Women
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Narrated by:
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Peter Ganim
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By:
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Samuel Beckett
About this listen
This is Samuel Beckett's first novel and "literary landmark" (St. Petersburg Times) - a savory introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, Dream of Fair to Middling Women offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts". When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky, and it was sadly never published during his lifetime.
In this stunning first novel, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and Alba - "wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final 'relapse into Dublin'" (New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.
©1992, 2012 The Samuel Beckett Estate (P)2012 Audible, Inc.Editorial reviews
Listeners take note: Peter Ganim’s explosive, incandescent performance of Dream of Fair to Middling Woman: A Novel, the classic first novel - posthumously published - from literary superstar and infamous playwright Samuel Beckett, is an event not to be missed.
Ganim pulls out all the stops as he rages and wrestles with love and lust, truly embodying protagonist Belacqua, a man caught between two women in a work too scandalous to achieve publication before Becket’s death. Ganim seems especially in tune with Beckett’s youthful energy, attacking the author’s complex syntax and sly humor with verve and delight, and filling his performance with inflections of joy and despair so tangible they seem to take life as you listen.
The biggest issue is the voice actor, narrator, doing the reading. He is trying really hard to almost act it like he is on stage. He also speaks in a way that sounds like wants to show off his voice by making longer lasting deeper pronunciation. For me , personally, it is incredibly distracting and made it very difficult to listen.
The biggest problem here is the voice narrator
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Last Becket I've read but most enjoyable
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An immature work even for this literary novice.
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