Murphy

Murphy

by Samuel Beckett
Murphy

Murphy

by Samuel Beckett

eBook

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Overview

Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a “striking case of love requited” but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life, Beckett’s work is also an early exploration of themes that recur throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity and the very meaning of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802198365
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date: 01/11/2011
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Samuel Beckett: Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity Universityin Dublin. In 1928, he visited Paris for the first time and fell in with a number of avant-garde writers and artists, including James Joyce. In 1937, he settled in Paris permanently. Beckett wrote in both English and French, though his best-known works are mostly in the latter language. A prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, he is remembered principally for his works for the theater, which belong to the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd and are characterized by their minimalist approach, stripping drama to its barest elements. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation." Beckett died in Paris in 1989.

At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000)

What People are Saying About This

Anthony Burgess

Samuel Beckett is one of the great controversial playwrights of our age….As a novelist he is just as important. His novels, like all important works of art, has the stamp of the inevitable on them: they had to be written and, though we suffer reading them, we are glad that they have been written.

Richard Seaver

Murphy is very much the forerunner of that remarkable series of works whose protagonists search endlessly for nonexistent answers, each embarked upon a journey that has no end.

Dr. Gierow

Dr. Karl Gierow of the Swedish Academy in the 1969 Commentary on the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Samuel Beckett
In the realms of annihilation, the writing of Samuel Beckett rises like a misereie from all mankind, its muffled minor key finding liberation to the oppressed and comfort to those in need.

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