Samuel Beckett's New Worlds: Style in Metafiction
by Susan D. Brienza
# Hardcover: 290 pages
# Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (March 1987)
Beckett's fiction since The Unnamable (1958) abandons complete sentences for repeated phrases and a "midget grammar." Brienza has undertaken the first stylistic analysis of Beckett's condensed prose, 12 pieces altogether in which "style and content reflect each other endlessly as in a fun house mirror." Since Beckett rarely uses the same stratagem twice, each work is treated separately, and the French original is often compared with the author's English version for clues to his meaning. Brienza is asking readers to do no less than create a vocabulary and syntax before they can begin to read Beckett's new fiction. This intellectual deciphering may or may not be emotionally satisfying, but it does yield a highly readable study of Beckett's impenetrable prose. Recommended for academic libraries. Lisa Mullenneaux
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