Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

Abstract

Herbert Blau's Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett is, in some sense, an inevitable book. Blau has been rehearsing his valedictory for some time, penning eulogies to the art of disappearance that encapsulates his theatre and his life. Is it any wonder then that in his work Blau repeatedly turns to Beckett, his pained and painfully optimistic (now late) friend of some forty years? Anyone who has read Blau's work or heard Blau speak knows about his strategic use of repetition, almost as if he is transcribing the workings of Godot in his own hand and in his own time. Blau's hand has always been evident in his elegant writing style, his time(s) now even more visibly generational, in the artists he has influenced and in his abiding taste for the Beckett he knew and whom we all have yet to know.