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Title: Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Samuel Beckett

Narrator: Peter Ganim

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-22-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 13 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

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.

Editorial Reviews:

Listeners take note: Peter Ganims 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 Beckets death. Ganim seems especially in tune with Becketts youthful energy, attacking the authors 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.

Members Reviews:

Early, polysyllabic Beckett

A one-star review should not be allowed to stand alone for this book, though I may provide inadequate challenge. A fan in particular of early Beckett, i.e. of "Murphy," and of the first part of "Watt" which features a certain Mr. Hackett, I found this exuberant, flamboyant exercise in quasi-poetic comic prose almost their equal. There are individual sentences to savor, for words-as-music (if one consider string quartets and oompah bands both musical), that describe outrageously comic situations and personae with an almost ferocious originality. Yes, the work's style, certainly the hero's stream-of-consciousness interlude, owes quite a bit to Joyce, but Beckett's signature dark humor is already richly manifest. Bleakness expressed in richness, buffoonery in elegant phrases, in color and obvious love of the medium. Beckett may have outdone Joyce in a cheeky display of authorial devices whereby he breaks boundaries of fiction and inserts himself, reveals the writing process, etc.