In 1928, a 22-year-old Samuel Beckett arrived in Paris as a lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure. Tom MacGreevy, his lifelong friend, introduced him to Joyce — and, at the end of his stay, to Proust, whom Beckett had never read. The result was his first book, Proust (1931), written when he was 25 and now republished by Faber & Faber with a foreword by Eimear McBride.
Jon Cook’s review reads it as a rare example of “critical modernism”:
- Criticism that refuses the usual hierarchy of critic over subject — Beckett fuses Proust’s text with his own until readers can’t tell whose words they’re reading.
- His scaffold for In Search of Lost Time: the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory; habit flattens the past into a monochrome album.
- Beckett’s first reaction was hostile — “offensively fastidious, artificial, and almost dishonest” passages, and the prospect of contemplating Proust “at stool for 16 volumes.”
- The book barely mentions the salons, gives Charlus a scant paragraph, and says of homosexuality only that “it is never called a vice.”
- Beckett himself was the first to say the study’s real subject was Beckett, not Proust.
The essay’s real subject is distance: the young man who closed his study borrowing, without reservation, Proust’s faith in the redemptive force of art. It took two decades and a world war to abandon redemption “in favour of an ineluctable drive to continue” — the engine of the trilogy and Waiting for Godot.