Returning to Samuel Beckett’s Company, the shift is notable: abandoning the habit of writing first in French. The work frequently alludes to earlier texts, and it is possible to hear echoes of The Unnamable, How It Is, and Murphy.
When reading Beckett’s later work, Lydia Davis’s observation comes to mind: “[Beckett and Joyce] evolved to a point where they seemed to . . . write more and more for their own pleasure and interest.” It is, perhaps, a lazy judgement in Beckett’s case. His prose, though sometimes difficult, is never less than lucid; the difficulty lies in the problems he confronts, not in any aesthetic self-indulgence. T. S. Eliot’s notion of the tension between words and meanings seems closer to the truth. If Joyce, particularly in Finnegans Wake, can occasionally appear to indulge in private amusements, Beckett’s challenges remain fundamentally serious.
Two slim volumes sustained recent reading: Beckett’s Company and Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. Ernaux’s forensic examination of her narrator’s life, here a two-year affair with a married man, maintains the relentless clarity that characterises all her work. Following Ernaux chronologically, at least through the translations available, continues to offer an uncompromising study of desire, memory, and language.
Immersion in the post-war Paris literary scene continues through John Calder’s The Garden of Eros, with occasional returns to Valerie Dodd’s George Eliot: An Intellectual Life—a study that rewards slow, attentive reading.