No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider

Rating:
Summary: For hard-core fans. Others might be bored.
Review: This book is a collection of correspondence, and like al collected correspondence, it must be taken with a grain of salt. Samuel Beckett was a brilliant, albeit incredibly self-indulgent author, and in this collection his personality is on full display. For example, he disregards bad reviews and cold audience reaction to his plays, because by and large he felt that they were not getting the joke, and that his writing was too complicated for the Philistines in the audience to appreciate.

Fans of Beckett will enjoy this book becuase it will help them understand who he was and where he was coming from in his absurd plays. Also, people who work in theater will be able to relate to the author-director relationship and understand how both artists shape what appears on stage. For those who are not Beckett experts (like myself), there is still much delight to be obtained from Beckett's prose. He won the Nobel Prize because he was an excellent writer, and this book provides otherwise unavailable pieces written by him -- his correspondence. However, unless the reader has a deep interest in one of the two corresponders it can get a little dry.