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Product Description
Book Description
New edition of the classic story collection, published for the first time by Faber with an introduction by Beckett scholar Cassandra Nelson
Product Description
His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett's men and women.
She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.
Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.
It is not.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The short stories about Belacqua are the most beautiful stories Beckett had ever written. They are so picturesque that you can feel the atmosphere with him. The short stories are about love, drinking and poetry. In Dante and the Lobster, Belacqua tries to roast a toast to a specific point. It takes all his energy to make the preparations for this ritual. In Fingal, Belacqua takes his girlfriend Winnie out for a ride to Poltrane. In the end he missed her and rode the way back with a stolen bike. In a wet night he walks in the rain to Alba. On his way to her, he gets controlled by an officer. In the control he pukes all over the shoes of the officer and tries to clean the shoes with a newspaper. In this moment you are all by yourself and laugh out loud. You can’t hide your joy of this lyrical depiction. The connection between the ten short stories is the life of Belacqua. He dies in one of the later stories by chance in a hospital. It is so funny because in an earlier story he hasn’t got the strength to kill himself and Ruby.
As you see, Belacqua needs a lot of girlfriends in the short stories. He fills it with black humour and it is a joy to read.
As you see, Belacqua needs a lot of girlfriends in the short stories. He fills it with black humour and it is a joy to read.
Format:Paperback
For those who know Samuel Beckett (If anybody knew Beckett) by his plays, this will be a suprise. In Godot and Krapps Last Tape you do see some fun, albeit black, come through. In this early work, we see Beckett introducing themes that last a lifetime, love and death. Probably more importantly how love causes a certain kind of death. In one of his works he talks about being born over a grave, which is true if you think about it, as only Beckett would. However these short stories are far lighter and remind me of the Beckett who said "Dublin is full of the cream of Ireland; white, rich and thick" Read them and you may well be suprised.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Beckett says: "Don't be a Belacqua"
4 July 2000
Format:Paperback
Though some people may be frustrated by "More Pricks than Kicks'" discontinuity of time and seeming discontinuity of plot, they mistake their own reaction. "MPTK" is a stark but strikingly beautiful collection of short stories unified by the main character's striking personality. That character is Belacqua Shuah, Samuel Beckett's Dubliner anti-hero; he, auto-biographically, has many elements in common with the author, which makes the book read somewhat like a honest and creative confessional.
Sometimes humorous, somtimes shockingly pessimistic, the short story format works surprisingly well, often allowing for especially clever closing images or phrases. The short story format also makes reading Beckett, rarely an easy task, a touch more accessable.
But through it all, Beckett, the master of the declarative sentence, constantly condemns his main character; Belacqua cannot find it within himself to shed a tear when one of his three wives dies, nor does he buy his new wife a new ring, recycling his old wife's ring (inscripted with her name and all) for his supposed new love. This incorrigible bumbler is intellectual to a fault, and dies friendless and unmourned. So all in all, read about Belacqua, but don't be him.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
a neglected great
3 Dec 2007
Format:Paperback
Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks is a hilarious collection of short stories. Far from being "stark" or "grim," it is a fudge-brownie layer cake of language and thick with dark, rich, black, earthy humor. These stories are a valuable corrective in reading Beckett who can come across as despairing, minimalist death warmed over. In fact, like Yeats and Joyce, he is as stout as Irish beer and as bracing as Irish whiskey.
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful
another Dublin
3 Nov 1997
Format:Paperback
By turns alright and horrid, this collection/novel is not the thing for you if Beckett's later novels (_Malloy_,_Malone_ _Dies_,_The_ _Unnamable_) or plays (_Godot_, _Endgame_) have attracted you to the area. More Pricks Than Kicks is the work of a young man, and one who is visibly struggling to get out from under a perturbing combination of Joycean influence and inedibly rich bombast (making this, to some palates, a game of spot the difference). *Dante and the Lobster* is a worthwhile read and comprises the vague first layer of the palimpsest that grew steadily sparser and attractive over the course of his career. *A Wet Night*, however, is simply horrid. Buckets of obsfucation poured through a fine seive of humor; little gets through. Leave the muck.
(why rated then an 8? the worst of Beckett is still better than so much else...)
Still, there's something of a diary to a young artist's work. Portrait would not be inappropriate, though Beckett, the artist he became, deserves better.
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