The New York Times Book Review once said that “In Beckett’s fiction, every other word serves to snap the reader back to consciousness.” Collected here in one volume, these three novels, which are among the most beautiful and disquieting of Samuel Beckett’s later prose works, come together with the powerful resonance of his famous Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. As Bob Halliday wrote in The Washington Post, “If Company corresponds to Malone Dies, Worstward Ho is the new Unnamable . . . . Read in its proper context as the most intense statement yet of its author’s vision, this work focuses to a pinpoint one of the great sensibilities in modern world literature.”
In Company, a voice comes to “one on his back in the dark” and speaks to him, describing significant moments in life, and yet we are told it is all a fable, memories or figments devised or imagined for the sake of company. Ill Seen Ill Said focuses attention on an old woman in a cabin who is part of the objects, landscape, rhythms, and movements of an incomprehensible universe. And in Worstward Ho, Beckett explores a tentative, uncertain existence in a world devoid of rational meaning and purpose. Here is language pared down to its most expressive, confirming Beckett’s position as one of the great writers of our time.
In Company, a voice comes to “one on his back in the dark” and speaks to him, describing significant moments in life, and yet we are told it is all a fable, memories or figments devised or imagined for the sake of company. Ill Seen Ill Said focuses attention on an old woman in a cabin who is part of the objects, landscape, rhythms, and movements of an incomprehensible universe. And in Worstward Ho, Beckett explores a tentative, uncertain existence in a world devoid of rational meaning and purpose. Here is language pared down to its most expressive, confirming Beckett’s position as one of the great writers of our time.
