Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett I: Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women
“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole. Beckett’s probably a clever fellow, but here he has elaborated a slavish and rather incoherent imitation of Joyce, most eccentric in language and full of disgustingly affected passages—also indecent: the book is damned—and you wouldn’t sell the book even on its title.”
Rotten Rejections, Samuel Beckett II: Molloy and Malone Dies
“I couldn’t read either book—that is, my eye refused to sit on the page and absorb meanings, or whatever substitutes for meaning in this kind of thing…. This doesn’t make sense and it isn’t funny…. I suspect that the real fault in these novels, if I cared to read them carefully, would be simply dullness. There’s no sense considering them for publication here; the bad taste of the American public does not yet coincide with the bad taste of the French avant-garde.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Mark's Text Terminal 
His novels clearly aren’t for everyone. The reader must enjoy using a dictionary, appreciate the windows that open and embrace the breeze that inevitably follows fulfilling the promise of great literature: a rapturous sense of wonder.
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