Description

Easton Press leather edition of John Updike's "Beck at Bay: A Quasi-Novel," a COLLECTOR'S edition, a First Edition, Personally signed by JOHN UPDIKE, this book numbered 639 out of 1,100, published in 1989. Bound in brown leather, the book has camel tan French moire silk end leaves, a satin book marker, symth-sewn binding, hubbed spine, gold gilding on three edges---in near FINE condition. John Hoyer Updike, who lived from 1932--2009, was an American novelist and short story writer. In this final volume of Updike's mock-heroic trilogy, the Jewish-American hero is older but scarcely wise. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive, lecherous, and self-absorbed, lost in a brave new literary world where his books are hyped by Swiss-owned conglomeration and showcased in chain stores attached to expresso bars. Bech is an irascible and long-suffering New York writer. In the opening chapter, in 1986, sixty-three year old Henry Bech visits the American Ambassador's residence in Prague in the last palace built in Europe with its long corridors, silk panels, marble-topped hall tables, and Metallicized oaken doors. As a Jew, Bech was conscious of the former owners, those "vanished plutocrats---elegant and multilingual---in the castle built by a rich Jewish banker, Otto Petschek," whose family fled Hitler and the castle. At the Ambassador's insistence, Bech visits the old Jewish cemetery and FRANZ KAFKA's grave in the new Jewish cemetery. In Czechoslovakia, Bech felt desperately unworthy, the unlucky country seemed to see in him an emblem of hope. Other chapters in the novel include: "Bech Presides," "Bech Pleads Guilty," "Bech Noir," and "Bech and the Bounty of Sweden," where Bech it was announced in a---"storm of protest---" that Bech had won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. The POST editors were stunned and the front-page said, "this turns the Prize into a prank." Bech in his heart agreed but he began his acceptance speech: "Royal Highnesses, Mr. Lord Mayor of Stockholm, Members of the Academy, distinguished guests both foreign and domestic, the Nobel Prize has become so big, so rich and famous . . .there is no one worthy to win it. . .Later Bech enjoyed the banquet in the vast Blue Hall of Stockholm's red-brick City Hall with the thirteen hunderd guests eating a special Nobel dinner while the Uppsala male choir sang and young women in blue peasant outfits danced down the broad stairs. Stockholm, scattered on its Baltic archipelago, shone with the cold. Swedish women sported blood-bright cheeks above their collars of wolf and fox as they carried their golden heads along the trendy streets, lined with restaurants and antique stores." Bech later says that "I don't think God plays well in Sweden. God sticks pretty close to the equator." 241 pages. I offer combined shipping.