William Y. Tindall – Samuel Beckett

I don’t usually make a point of reviewing ‘academic’ books for a set of very good reasons. I guess the main of which is the fact that I doubt any of my readers would particularly want to read about some obscure critical theory that was written up decades ago. But upon reading a critical theory book about the writer Samuel Beckett earlier this week…I have to confess that to not review it would be a travesty. Now that isn’t to say I’m going to be singing the praises of W. Tindall and urging you all to rush out and buy a copy…quite the reverse in fact.

How on earth this booklet (at 48 pages, it’s not even half as lengthy as a novella) got into hardcover print is absolutely beyond me. I wholly understand that scholarly writing can be both dry and verbose at times, but that would have been preferable to this piece of work. The style I encountered whilst struggling through this book was erratic. Different points were repeated over and again with slightly different wording, the punctuation made the flow of the work about as smooth to read as a porcupine’s back, and I found a number of pieces of absolute conjecture, with no evidence or even reasoning to back up his claims. Finally (and I know that this isn’t limited to necessarily bad works of criticism, especially in the arts, but I’m going to add it here anyway) Tindall refuses to use two or three words when one long, run on sentence will do. Yes, Mr. Critic, thank you for telling me in detail what happens in Beckett’s work…now do what you’re supposed to and impart some sort of knowledge that I /cant/ look up on Wikipedia.

As scathing as my last paragraph comes across, I cannot deny the fact that there are some parts of this critical analysis of Beckett that are genuinely interesting and informative. Unfortunately, they seem to be anti-social, hiding behind verbose, dry sentences which add very little to the overall reading. It’s clear that Tindall knows a great deal about the subject (and so he should, having been published), but it’s as though he wrote the entire thing without properly formulating what he was going to talk about when. The points flow from one to the other almost as though it’s a train of thought, and so information is lost behind sentences which cry out for a decent editor.

The lack of succinct information would have been largely remedied if the writing had been presented in a more accessible manner. Within this piece, I wouldn’t expect chapters, per say, but subheadings would have been more preferable than having to trawl through all forty-something pages of information and stumble unexpectedly on the types of quotations I wanted to reference just after another paragraph which had nothing to do with the later topic. The paragraphs themselves were of a decent length however, with none of them being over about half a page long (which in a critical companion is a rare treat). This at least made it easier to speed-read and skim across sections.

The added Beckett bibliography at the end of the book spans two and a half pages, and is relatively informative, even offering to the reader some of Beckett’s translated works. I certainly can’t fault the succinctness of this part of the book, but I was disappointed that there wasn’t an index. Even with no sub-headings, knowing whereabouts in the book each of the plays and suchlike were mentioned would have gone a long way to help with speed of referencing.

In short, although this book does have some redeeming qualities, they are rather firmly lost in the myriad of verbosity (this is my new favourite word, can you tell?) thanks to the structure and layout. It’s not the best thing to try and read, there are far, far better critical companions to Samuel Beckett out there. If you can, let this one remain on the bookshelf and pick up a different one instead. Especially if you’re in a hurry and don’t want to wade through a lot of unnecessary padding in order to get to the few shards of decent criticism.

2 Responses to “William Y. Tindall – Samuel Beckett”

1. Sophie Gulizio says:

   March 18, 2010 at 9:09 pm

   Great read. Thanks for the info!
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   March 24, 2010 at 12:02 pm

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