Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Beckett’s first ‘literary landmark’ ( St Petersburg Times ) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua – a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba – ‘wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final “relapse into Dublin”’ ( New Yorker ). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.