Calder Publications The Heretic of Soana Hauptmann Gerhart

Like all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it extensively in his novels, plays and poetry. Beckett’s works also explored philosophy and the imaginative world of Dante and Milton, as well as the theories of Darwin and scientific speculation, in order to create a literature that investigates human destiny more deeply and originally than any other writer had done before • In this, his second book about the essence and depth of Samuel Beckett’s thinking and literary art, John Calder analyses the dualism of Beckett’s theological writing, his debt to the Gnostics, Manichaeism and Geulincx in particular, the presence of ghosts in his work, and why his late writing has received so little attention compared to the early and middle periods

Increasingly Samuel Beckett’s writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century – succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare’s in the late Renaissance. John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject’s thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see. Samuel Beckett’s acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality – even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion

The Wallace is a historical play dramatizing the life of one of Scotland’s greatest heroes, William Wallace, whose revolt against England in the early fourteenth century led to his capture and execution, but, also through the continuing and successful rebellion of his successor, Robert the Bruce, to eventual Scottish independence • The author is revealed not only as a major dramatic poet, but as a chronicler of history. The work carries an excitement and emotional charge that can infect an audience with the author’s own concern for freedom and justice

Above a disused bar, in a dilapidated Parisian hotel that houses an assortment of indigent, marginalized lost souls, one of the inhabitants, a mysterious, reclusive holy man, is the subject of much speculation from some of his fellow occupants and respectful reverence from others. As the tale unfolds, the dynamics of this precarious microcosm are laid bare, in a powerful portrayal of those society has forgotten • Written when the author of Cain’s Book was at the height of his creative powers and enjoying an increasing reputation in avant-garde literary circles, ‘The Holy Man’ is here presented with ‘A Being of Distances’, ‘Peter Pierce’ and ‘A Meeting’, stories which similarly tackle themes of loneliness and disenfranchisement

This collection brings together the four plays that feature Ionesco’s everyman protagonist Jean Berenger. In ‘The Killer’, he comes across a “radiant city”, an ideal civilization which is being terrorized by a killer, whom he tries to help apprehend. In ‘Rhinoceros’, he is the only person in a provincial town who is not affected by a condition that turns its victims into the eponymous horned beast. In ‘Exit the King’, he is the powerful King Berenger the First, who refuses to accept that he is dying. And in ‘A Stroll in the Air’ he acquires the capacity of flight and sees another world lying beyond the clouds • While each play in the Berenger cycle is unique, they are all prime examples of Ionesco’s conception of the theatre of the absurd, and touch on themes that preoccupied the author throughout his career, such as mortality, alienation, freedom and the evils of Fascism

Set in a big Dublin hotel of the mid-nineteenth century, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs is a total theatre creation. In it, we discover that Albert, the perfect waiter – who never drinks, smokes or flirts with the chambermaids – is in fact a woman who once dressed as a man to avoid poverty and is now trapped in the role • Based on a short story by George Moore, which was recently adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Glenn Close, Benmussa’s story releases a string of disturbing questions about the nature of women and society, and is one of the most powerful and groundbreaking plays of the 1970s

A young woman, who works as a maid for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences, as she speaks of her desire for a more stable future and he of his feelings of rootlessness and disillusionment. As the afternoon wears on, the two sense an increasing connection between them • Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras’s finest novels, which she also adapted for the stage

During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities – a distant relative, an orderly and a jockey who had an affair with his wife – remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death • A groundbreaking work, for which Claude Simon devised a prose technique mimicking the mind’s fluid thought processes, The Flanders Road is not only a masterpiece of stylistic innovation, but also a haunting portrayal – based on a real-life incident – of the chaos and savagery of war

Described by the New York Times as “both beautifully written and devastating”, The Book of Night Women is a startling, hard-edged dissection of slavery – a tour de force of voice and storytelling • At the heart of the novel is the extraordinary character of Lilith, a spirited slave girl struggling to transcend the violence into which she is born, her story narrated in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page. Overflowing with high drama and heartbreak, at its centre is the conspiracy of the Night Women, a clandestine council of fierce slave women plotting an island-wide revolt. Rebellions simmer, incidents of sadism and madness run rampant, and the tangled web of power relationships dramatically unravels amid dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion

It starts with a single black hair, growing thick and immovable from her spine • Marianne is grieving. Desperately trying to hold down some semblance of a normal life, she forces herself to go through the motions: cooking dinner with her boyfriend, showing up to work, calling her parents when she feels able to handle their reminders of all she has lost. And then, her body begins to betray her • When no one can explain what is going on, Marianne’s doctor directs her to Nede, an experimental health retreat deep in the Welsh countryside. By the time Marianne starts to suspect that all is not as it seems at Nede, it’s already too late • Dark and incendiary, The Weight of Loss is a moving novel about grief and resilience, full of surprising twists

Longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize • Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision • They had no idea, when they arrived in Morocco, that their usual freedoms as young European women would not be available. So, when the spry Saleh presents himself as their guide and saviour, they embrace his offer. He extracts them from a tight space, only to lead them inexorably into an even tighter one: and from this far darker space there is no exit • Their tale of confinement and escape is as old as the landscapes and cultures so vividly depicted in this story of where Europe and Africa come closest to meeting, even if they never quite touch

The premature death of Sydney Goodsir Smith at the age of fifty-nine, while this volume of his Collected Poems was in production, deprived the world of one of the major personalities in twentieth-century British literature • The poems included in this volume, mostly written in Scots dialect – from ‘Skail Wind’, first published in 1941, to the moving poems of his maturity and the gentle, philosophical poems of his later years – show us the journey of a man who understood the world only too well