Dream of fair to middling women
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". Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women" is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.