• The My Reading series offers personal models of what it is like to care about particular authors and works, and to show their effect upon a reader's own thinking and development
• A mix of personal response to Beckett's fictional works and descriptions of how they work
• Written in an accessible style
• Makes Beckett into a sympathetic human writer rather than a difficult purveyor of post-modern ideas
• Blends readings of Beckett's letters with discussions of his published work
• Will appeal to readers who want an introduction to Beckett or those who appreciate an informed account of the pleasures of reading his work

   
A book on the experience of reading the works of Samuel Beckett.
  
After a life of writing about Victorian novelists, Rosemarie Bodenheimer found herself entranced by the work of Samuel Beckett. In this book she shares her journey of discovery with readers who may or may not be familiar with Beckett's novels and stories. She follows his trajectory from the first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, through the great post-war trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and on to the ever more experimental inventions in the shorter, later fictions, and monologues. Through readings of his work alongside extracts from his published correspondence, Beckett emerges as a sympathetic human figure, a poet of productive doubt, and a brilliant stylist of mood changes and second thoughts.
  
Bodenheimer considers Beckett's treatments of memory, nostalgia, and grief, and the forms he finds to convey those essential human experiences while avoiding melodrama or sentimentality. His dramatized relationship with his own writing is a crucial part of that emotional landscape. His playful jousts with the conventions of novel-writing show how, from the start, Beckett challenged the notion of character and other inherited novel conventions. The book also emphasizes his dismantling of the autobiographical "I" his moving narratives of attachment and loss, and the inimitable mixture of comedy and pathos he creates by inventing outlandish situations to which his characters respond in very recognizable human ways.