I wonder if anyone has any views on who is the best ever writer? My vote goes to Samuel Beckett...cant be beat!

'Good' - not to mention 'better' and 'best' - are such slippery concepts, though, aren't they. So much which is good about a good writer is to do with intangibles, and personal responses, and indeed about genre - what's brilliant about a cracking commercial thriller is incommensurable with what's brilliant about Twelfth Night. And texts written for performance are different again: should one judge them against texts for reading at all?

Interesting question, though.

Emma

Hi, Brightlad and welcome to WriteWords

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- NaomiM

Hi naomiM, thank you for the welcome.

Emma, you are right about subjective response but quite a number of academic literary critics agree with me about Beckett. His work is very radical, destroying conventional narrative and plot while dealing with the deepest questions of human existence.
I dont think it is possible for writers to write in the same way after Beckett and be taken seriously.
He has set a new bar to leap in literature whether you prefer to ignore him or not.

Best ever? Impossible to quantify & beside the point.

I think a great work is one that bears repeated reading/viewing/listening at different stages/situations of your life & which you get something different out of each time. Anna Karenina does that for me - it offers so many substantial characters and viewpoints.

The first time I read it, aged 16 or so (i.e. as angry adolescent male), I was very much taken by Levin and didn't have much time for Anna.

Second time, in my mid-twenties, Levin seemed rather irritatingly adolescent & I could had much more sympathy for Anna (reflecting my own process of growing up, beginning to understand the opposite sex a little more etc).

Third time, late twenties, I started to become more interested in Karenin & Vronsky & the nature of 'duty', ideas of determinism etc (reflecting own feelings of being trapped in a certain career, value system etc).

Last time, mid thirties, I became more aware of Kitty, Dolly, Levin's brother, Dolly's brother etc (reflecting own feelings of being outside things, searching for perspective etc).

Beckett's certainly radical, but so is any great author, if your criterion is that they change the form and/or what it expresses in ways which prove to be permanent: Aeschylus, for example, or Cervantes or Austen.

I'd agree with you, RJH, that multi-valency is probably as good a criterion as any other: at a basic level, is it worth reading again?

But in the end it's like saying which is a 'greater' dish, let alone greatest ever: boeuf bourguinon or crepes suzette...

Emma

Hi all!
An interesting lot of replies to my challenge. I think it is true that there are various criteria to be considered when judging the worth of a writer such as his or her influence on contempories, the stature of fellow artists who value the writer and the general agreement of individual and critics who respond to the work.
It was felt and is still felt that Beckett was the writer who most captured the despair and collapse of values that the second World War brought to humanity. But he conveyed all this with great poetry and prose skills that have seldom been equalled.
I certainly have not read any literture that has such an effect upon my imagination as Beckett though I have heard music and responded to paintings is such a way.
What I am trying to say is that I believe that Beckett brought something unique to literature, that he extended its possibilities.

I'm getting the message that you like Beckett...

I've read very little Beckett, but am always considering giving him a go. Where should I start?

Hi RJH
I would start with the light novels MURPHY and MERCIER AND CAMIER before moving onto the, still humourous but heavy stuff such as the triology MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEABLE.
Then a night at the theatre to see ENDGAME or KRAPPS LAST TAPE. The big one is WAITING FOR GODOT which changed world theatre forever.

Hello, Brightlad!

It all comes down to personal taste, of course, but I say Jane Austen, every time.

Rosy

Hi and welcome to WW

I did my university dissertation on Samuel Beckett. He's definitely unique and my fellow countryman.

Seeing the plays performed live is always a great experience!

I agree Becket's a great but he's not easy is he? And I agree with RJH that if you can read a novel and have a different reading every time it's always a good sign. For me I'd say George Eliot for Middlemarch. A novel to read in your middle-age.

It was felt and is still felt that Beckett was the writer who most captured the despair and collapse of values that the second World War brought to humanity.

Not disagreeing (not agreeing either) but passive voice hides many things: who did feel and does still feel this?

Emma

I love Dickens best of all.

The academic literary critics can go boil their heads.

Hi EmmaD
yep it is true that there is a danger in not being accurate with labels and so on and some critics could say that the despair in Beckett is a symptom rather than a response to modern times.
However I feel that we must respond to Beckett in an intuitive rather than a rational sense. That is, we feel his relevance rather than think it.
Jamesjames- I think Dickens is good too, the way he gets us fully involved in his narratives...a giant of victorian literature. True enough, the critics can be a bit bossy at times and perhaps quite a few of the critics bless the day Beckett was born because a few of them make a living from interpreting Beckett and that is an irony because Beckett was against any interpretation of his work other than the immediate visceral response I spoke of above.