Beckett, Samuel

New York. 1981. Grove Press. 1st American Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394522338. 59 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul McMillen. keywords: Literature Ireland. FROM THE PUBLISHER - ILL SEEN ILL SAID is among the most beautiful and disquieting of Beckett's later prose works. As though in an ever increasing awareness of the inadequacy of words to express an ill- apprehended reality. Beckett has chosen here to pare them down to their most expressive, letting a few words fall like bits of meaning to the page. ‘See now how words too. A few drops mishaphazard. Then strangury. To say the least. Less.' Our attention focuses on an old woman in a cabin ‘at the inexistent centre of a formless place.' She is part of the objects, landscape, rhythms and movements of an incomprehensible universe. We are not certain of her existence, of her actions, of the objects she sees and touches, nor can we be, as the viewer's perception of it all is obscured. ‘Such the confusion now between real and-how say its contrary? No matter. That old tandem. Such now the confusion between them once so twain. And such the farrago from eye to mind. For it to make what sad sense of it may. No matter now. Such equal liars both. Real and-how ill say its contrary? The counter-poison.' No certainty is possible in this ‘Unspeakable globe. Unbearable.', for at the very core of existence lies a defective perception of an inaccessible object. ‘The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. Haze sole certitude.' . Samuel Beckett was born on April 13 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland. Just before World War II he took up residence in France, where h has been living since, writing most of his work in French. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. inventory #1260 ISBN: 0394522338.