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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.914
EAN num: 9780802150967
ISBN number: 0802150969
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 4
Printing Date: January 18, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 57434
Studio: Grove Press
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User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Alas this isn't the best of his works - Death etc. was most impressive. But The Room and The Black and White make for fascinating reads, and should be even more exciting when staged. This should come before Beckett in anyone's reading.
Rated by buyers 
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HAROLD Pinter's career as a playwright is highly distinguished by anyone's reckoning. Many critics have no reservations in calling him 'our greatest living playwright'. But few would argue that it is on a handful of stage plays, from The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Old Times, No Man's Land, and Betrayal in the 1970s, that his reputation rests.
In recent times, Pinter's celebrity has depended more on his politics than on his plays. The master of the dramatic pause now seems more of a rebel without a pause, taking almost every opportunity to make moral pronouncements on current affairs. A scathing critic of US foreign policy and British Government support for it, he was prominent in the popular campaign against the recent Iraq war, even penning a poem in the lead-up to the conflict: 'Here they go again/The Yanks in their armoured parade/Chanting their ballads of joy/As they gallop across the big world/Praising America's God...'
In an earlier letter to the New York Review of Books in 1994, Pinter differentiated US foreign policy from the mass murder inspired by Hitler, Stalin and Mao only on the grounds of its moral hypocrisy: 'The great difference between the ruthless foreign policy of the US and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant'.
Rated by buyers 
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One review of Pinter's plays says that "part of the greatness of Pinter's work is that I'm at a loss to explain it." What complete and utter rubbish! Basically that means that either Pinter is great because I'm too dumb to understand him, or Pinter is great because he makes no sense, so obviously he is really deep and profound. Well here's my take: I'm comfortably on the upper half of the food chain when it comes to intelligence, and when I'm at a loss to explain why an author's work is great, it's because his work, in fact, is not great. I wouldn't say the same thing about nuclear physics or brain surgery - when somebody does great work in those fields and I don't understand it, I'll chalk it up to "this guy might be really smart and I just don't know what he's talking about." But literature? Come on... the whole point of literature is that it is supposed to connect with the reader, not bewilder him. It's supposed to reveal meaningful truths about humanity, not leave us feeling dazed and confused. It's supposed to create a bond between writer and reader, not create a vast intellectual divide.
So back to Mr. Pinter... He's just not all that good. I will say a few nice things about him. The plays aren't boring, as some people have suggested. Seriously, how can you get bored reading a play that's only 30 pages long? The cadence of the dialog is catchy, and the plays have a certain rhythm to them that you can tap your foot to. And Pinter is very good at creating a sense of anxiety within his characters. Since there isn't much going on in these plays in terms of action, and since the stage is sparsely decorated, and the dialog is often terse and stunted, the reader ends up focusing more on what is not there, and what is not happening, and what is not being said, rather than what is. So you constantly ask yourself, Who are those people in the basement that we know nothing about and who we are never going to meet? What is this job that is going to be done, but never gets described in any kind of detail? By building his plays around characters who never appear and events that never occur, Pinter forces us to wonder anxiously about the unknown. He creates this eerie sense of mystery, this feeling that we are all alone in a world that we know very little about.
But here's the key question: So what? Sure, he's good at making us feel uncomfortable, but he doesn't take it any farther than that. You would think that to win the Nobel Prize, your readers would at least have to understand why you want them to feel uncomfortable. What is your message? What are you saying about our world and the human experience? It's simply not enough to create a mood. There has to be a point to it, and it's just not clear what the point is to these plays.
Rated by buyers 
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First, the reason for one star is a reminder to leave Pinter's plays to others.
I read the "The Birthday Party," and, "The Room," and may or may not read the rest of the plays.
Informatively I am an avid reader with a vast collection.
The Birthday Party and The Room did not have one redeeming feature. I could not believe that anything written could be so bad.
In my opinion both were absolute garbage and I wonder how and why in the very first place it was every published. When I finished reading this nonsense a thought came to mind as follows:
If a monkey was placed by a computer keyboard and was allowed to
go crazy hitting the keys, the result would probably be, "The Birthday Party and The Room.
Since I was punished enough reading the above, reading the rest of the plays would only compound my bewilderment and disappointment in choosing this book.
If this book was offered to a publisher by a writer other than Harold Pinter and the editor read the very first two plays, if he read that far, which I doubt, he would have thrown the book in his waste basket followed by an oath.
Unfortunately, I purchased a couple of the Pinter Books from Amazon.com and will check them out only because I purchased them
and am curious to learn if they are as bad a read as the one I reviewed.
Robert Lyons
Reno, Nevada
Rated by buyers -
Pinter's work is the proof that you can manage to be boring without being longwinded. I have always found him close to impossible to read. As for the famous pauses and threats which make his onstage theatre so compelling to his fans, these I have found only heighten the annoying quality of the reading.
Pinter is an heir of Beckett and belongs to 'The Real Mankind is the diminished broken fragment of itself' school.
But these broken voices, these characters always seeming to menace and imprison each other, present a kind of picture of humanity at one minor extreme only.
Pinter in his political work presents himself as a spokesman for the oppressed of Mankind and has for years attacked the United States.
The United States is without its faults, mistakes and misjudgments nonetheless the single major force in the world which prevents Mankind from falling into a dark night of Totalitarian Terror.
To take advantage of the freedoms given by the world's democracies to attack in an exaggerated way these democracies
is the kind of moral teaching which can lead Mankind to nothing but a 'dark night of the soul' in which no one will ever dare to read the kind of literary work Pinter has devoted his life to.
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