Laura Del-Rivo, The Furnished Room

Nicolas Tredell (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1961

Places

United Kingdom (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Furnished Room (1961), the first novel of Laura Del-Rivo (b. 1934), combines a portrait of London bohemian life in the late 1950s, existential explorations, and a thriller element. It would be filmed two years later by Michael Winner (1935-2013) as West 11 (1963), with a script by Willis Hall (1929-2005) and Keith Waterhouse (1929-2009). The surname of the novel’s anti-hero, Joseph Ignatius (known as Joe) Beckett, inevitably recalls an earlier novel of a misfit protagonist in the capital, Murphy (1938) by Samuel Beckett (1906-89). But The Furnished Room is not late-modernist in the Murphy mode. Structurally, it is a fairly straightforward third-person narrative, told from Beckett’s viewpoint, …

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2635 words

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Furnished Room". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 July 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35040, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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