Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Samuel Beckett’s first novel and “literarylandmark” (St. Petersburg Times), Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize–winning author.Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was poorand strugglingto make ends meet, thenovel 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 mywild thoughts.” When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them foundit too literary, too scandalous, or too risky; it was never published duringhis lifetime.

As the story begins, Belacqua—a young versionof Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and thelittle Alba—“wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies andcontinents, before a final ‘relapse into Dublin’” (The New Yorker).Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair toMiddling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights inthe wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, thestory brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, piercesthe darkness of his vision.