"Like Beckett, 'Man or Mango?' elicits smiles of compassion and recognition as it makes you wince at how grim things can be."--Patsy Baudoin, "Boston Book Review", June 1998.
According to Kirkus Reviews (02/01/2001), Markson is "one of our few worthy successors to Beckett."
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Boyle says, in a New York Times interview (04/25/1993): "In my own books, I've tried to keep a sort of Beckettian humor about the grim things of our world, while struggling toward the light."
Beckett's fiction was the topic of Coetzee's Ph.D. dissertation, and Beckett's allegorical, surreal work was a major influence.
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Gao Xingjian lists Samuel Beckett among his artistic influences.
Auster greatly admired Beckett's work, and the two writers met in 1979.
Carey names Beckett as one of his major influences.
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Buster Keaton's comic silent films were an inspiration to much of Beckett's fiction and drama. He starred in the only film Beckett ever wrote, "Film".
Beckett read HUMBOLDT'S GIFT in 1978 and admired it so much he requested a meeting with Bellow.
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"If I were a philosopher I'd be a pessimist. But as I'm not how can I be?"
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After being educated at Trinity College, Samuel Beckett lived off and on in Paris and London, finally settling in Paris for good in 1937. He was briefly James Joyce's secretary, and had a romantic relationship with Joyce's unstable daughter, Lucia. Beckett wrote mainly in French, often translating his own work into English. He wrote several novels that are considered works of genius, and considers his fiction to be his best work, but his greatest success was as a dramatist, with "Waiting for God more...
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04/13/1906 Dublin, Ireland, Republic of, Ireland, British Isles, Western Europe,
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A difficult read: enigmatic and sometimes inhuman but hilarious at the same time. I find myself often frustrated when reading it, but unable to ever throw it away. Make whatever sense of it that you can. Approach it from whatever angle seems best to you. Scholars debate this book and all of Beckett's oeuvre to this day, and no one has quite nailed him down yet. This book(s) will illicit a very palpable response from you; whether it will be of visceral disgust, the most profound sadness, or every type of laugh within the gamut of human experience will depend on you. For me it was all these things and much more...