A Country Road, a Tree

March 21, 2016
Baker’s intimate portrait of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) focuses on the critical years 1939–1946, during which time Beckett began his relationship with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, whom he later married; participated in the French Resistance, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre; and developed the modern perspective and minimalist style that earned him the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. A brief prologue shows Beckett as a boy in Ireland climbing a tree while his mother tries in vain to keep him within the bounds of safety. Part One, entitled “The End,” flashes forward to England’s entry into World War II. Drinking, depressed, and home in Ireland after living in France, Beckett longs to return to Paris, although he’s haunted by his mother’s question: what possible use can he be there? Once back in France, without papers or income, Beckett reconnects with mentor/friend James Joyce, the great Irish author whose genius overshadows Beckett’s own frustrated attempts at writing. When German forces move into Paris, and one of Beckett’s dearest friends, a communist, is arrested, Beckett joins the Resistance, serving in Paris and the French countryside, first as a translator, then in combat. Examples of wartime decency and brutality, instances of courage and betrayal, periods of time when nothing happens, and shortages that limit life to essentials all stir Beckett’s sense of absurdity in modern life. Baker details how wartime experiences provide the key to Beckett’s transformation from Joyce disciple to distinctive literary voice. In this worthy successor to Longbourn, she skillfully captures Beckett’s world, the rhythms of his bare-bones prose, and the edginess of his point of view.

March 15, 2016
The experiences of a struggling Irish writer in France during World War II--joining the Resistance, fleeing the Gestapo, risking everything again after escaping to the free zone--will help shape his groundbreaking literary future, suggests this novel based on the life of Samuel Beckett. Having turned Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice on its head in Longbourn (2013), Baker moves on to more recent but bleaker literary pastures with a biofiction tracing the life of Beckett, the brooding "spindly giant," from 1939 to 1946. Before the war begins, the young author has escaped his difficult relationship with his mother by settling in Paris, where he finds work as a secretary to James Joyce, a partner named Suzanne, and a creative community. However, once war is declared and Paris falls, life becomes increasingly harsh and is further darkened by Joyce's death. Beckett joins the Resistance, his role to find patterns in scraps of information. But the cell is betrayed, and Beckett and Suzanne are forced to flee, enduring a terrifying journey to Roussillon, which includes an interminable wait by a tree in a nameless place, a woman who can't stop talking, and the constant agony of ill-fitting boots. These passing but pointed references to Beckett's great works to come--Waiting for Godot, Not I, etc.--and philosophical speculations ("And so one finds one goes on living...") are intrusive. Baker's impressionistic character portrait works hard at evoking a questing, solitary intelligence during a period of physical and mental anguish and wholesale destruction, but Beckett is a world-class literary enigma, and any such attempt was perhaps always going to fall short of full-blooded conviction. Baker's virtuoso imagining of war's terrors and privations is not quite matched by her depiction of a unique, consistently elusive artistic identity.

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April 15, 2016
In her latest novel, Baker, the author of Longbourn (2013), reimagines Irish writer Samuel Beckett's involvement with the French Resistance during WWII. Over his mother's objections, Beckett left the relative safety of his family home in Ireland in 1939 to return to Paris in the days just before France declared war on Germany. When the Nazis reach Paris, Beckett and his love, Suzanne, flee alongside Beckett's mentor, James Joyce, and his wife, Nora. While the Joyces seek a safe haven in Switzerland, Beckett and Suzanne ultimately return to Paris, where a friend of Beckett's draws them into the resistance effort. Though the tasks are smallkeeping track of German troops in Paris and relaying that information to contactsthe danger is great, and the couple is soon forced out of the city once again, setting out on a harrowing journey to the countryside, where Beckett agrees to even more perilous missions. Taking its title from Beckett's most famous play, Waiting for Godot, Baker's historical drama deftly explores the psyche of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015

Having taken us downstairs with the Bennet family servants in Longbourn, a LibraryReads pick, Baker reimagines the life of Samuel Beckett as he leaves Ireland for Paris in 1939, eventually working for the French Resistance. Audaciously, she aims to show Beckett struggling to find the language to record what he's seen.

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