SB

Mark Sarvas, on the Elegant Variation, links to John Banville's piece in The New Republic on Beckett's Letters.

Banville's review is odd in various ways. He seems to feel that something is badly wrong if a writer is not warmhearted and candid. (Qualities for which, of course, readers have been flocking to Beckett for close to a century.) Joyce, it seems, was manipulative, cunning, cold and a cad - unlike Beckett, the Man of Feeling.

There's an odd determination to reclaim Beckett for banality. Here's Banville on Beckett in Paris:

Despite poverty and a propensity to melancholy--as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work says, "an unhappiness like mine, there's no annihilating that"--Beckett in those years lived the not-uncongenial life of the artistic expatriate, eating and drinking in the bars of Montparnasse and spending much time in the merry surroundings of the quarter's numerous brothels.

("spending much time in the merry surroundings of the quarter's numerous brothels" - well, if Beckett were with us today I feel sure he would enjoy this, which you can't say of every review)

I was going to comment on other oddities, but weary bafflement triumphs.