This week I returned to Samuel Beckett, to Company, in which he changed his habit of writing firstly in French. I thought I’d read it before, but I am not so sure. Company alludes frequently to earlier work, and it may be that, instead of rereading, I am hearing echoes of The Unnamable, How It Is, and Murphy.

When reading Beckett’s later work, I often think of Lydia Davis’s comment that, “[Beckett and Joyce] evolved to a point where they seemed to . . . write more and more for their own pleasure and interest.” It is, I think, a lazy judgement in Beckett’s case, whose prose is never less than lucid, though it is sometimes difficult, that struggle between (reference T. S. Eliot)  words and their meanings.  If a writer like Beckett is hard it is because the problems he is trying to resolve are difficult. (In the case of Joyce and Finnegans Wake, I’m with Davis, though it must have been amusing to compose).

Both books I finished this week were slim, yet will repay rereading several times. The other, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. Her forensic examinations of her narrators’ lives, in this case of a two-year lover affair with a married man, are always compelling. I’m reading them all, at least those available in English translation, chronologically.

I ordered  four books this week from Alma Books, home of what was once Calder Publications. Each book is written by John Calder: The Garden of Eros, Pursuit, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, and The Theology of Samuel Beckett. I’m enjoying immersion in the post-war Paris literary scene via The Garden of Eros. I also dipped into Valerie Dodd’s George Eliot: An Intellectual Life, which arrived after a two-month wait.