First love, and other shorts
(Book)

Translations from the original French of four pieces by the author; others originally written in English.

First Love, a man's musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father's grave, was first written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1945, but it wasn't until 1973 that he completed the English translation. Christopher Ricks, in New Statesman, describes it as follows: "The cracked and crackling narrator of First Love who tells of how he met a women on a bench, went back to live with her, and left her as she was giving birth to his child -- has all the pertinacity of that bone-deep fatigue which gives Beckett's decrepit figures (ruined leech-gatherers) their ruthless strength, their rigor, not mortis but of moribundity." Also included in this volume is Not I, the new stage work which had its world premiere at the Lincoln Center last year and which critics hailed as a great new work by the Nobel Prize-winning author. Clive Barnes called it "superb" and Martin Gottfried of Women's Wear Daily said it was "a major theatrical and literary event ... very beautiful and deeply moving -- a small and unique masterpiece." Also included with these works are the shorter prose pieces From an Abandoned Work, Enough, Imagination Dead Imagine, and Ping, as well as the short piece for the stage, Breath.

BSLW RECAT 2023