Deirdre bair parisian lives
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Atlantic Books
A The Times & Sunday Times Book of the Year
‘Fascinating… Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing’ Sunday Times
‘Gripping… A story well told.‘ New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the pris Prize for Biography 2020
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a reporter with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure tillgång to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written – or even read – a biography herself. The next seven years of något privat eller personligt conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other – and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes
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Bair, Deidre. Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, andMe: A Memoir. Talese/Doubleday, New York. 2019. Autobiography, 2/23.
I came to read this through a bit of a strange quest. A friend had recommended Bair’s Beckett. But the book wasn’t on Kindle, copies were available through Amazon only for a hundred dollars or more and they didn’t have a copy at the local library. So I dug into Parisian Lives because I could download it on my electronic reader and I guess hoping for some sort of access to something about the great playwright.
I didn’t end up any further ahead in trying to find out about Samuel Beckett. Ms Bair who died just two years ago is wonderfully thorough and this attention to detail is what if anything illuminates her partial autobiography, although it came with the kind of lighting you’d find on a research bench or maybe in an autopsy room. Pitilessly revealing of every detail. And she knows what she’s doing and gives the impression that maybe