This brief (sixty large-print pages), late work is one of Beckett's finest achievements, a beautiful, lucent and moving meditation on old age and death ("Sweet foretaste of the joy at journey's end"). The text, presented in short, lightly punctuated sections, at first seems impossibly dense and oblique, but at a second or third reading the language opens in the mind like a tightly enfolded flower. The subject is an old woman, living alone in an isolated house, and watched over by a mysterious circle of guardians. As always in Beckett, a few humble objects - a button-hook, an old coat, a kitchen chair - are concentrated upon with such passion that they take on a numinous significance (a bent nail "All set to serve again. Like unto its glorious ancestors. At the place of the skull. One April afternoon. Deposition done."). The reputations of most writers decline in the immediate period after their deaths, and although Beckett is still held in high esteem as a stage writer, there is a danger that superb late prose works such as Ill Seen Ill Said and Stirrings Still will be regarded as little more than shavings from the work bench; in fact, they are the distillation of his genius.
This handsome little edition is very good value. It comes with reissues, also from the formidible John Calder, of two early novels, Murphy (£6.99 in UK) and the extraordinary Watt (£9.99 in UK). Also out in paperback is Lois Gordon's The World of Samuel Beckett 1906-1946 (Yale, £9.95 in UK), a detailed, informative and sympathetic study of the writer's life up to the period when he truly came of age as an artist.