Samuel Beckett was born around Easter time, April 13, 1906. His newest book, Ill Seen Ill Said is a sort of birthday present for himself, one might say, mentally grinning with the silent laughter that he has characterized as being most his own kind of laughter, a present for his 75th birthday. And what a fine present it is! Sixty-one short paragraphs of limpid, lucid, uncannily dense, yet light and powerful sentences; sentences neither prose nor poetry, or it would be much better to say, neither prose-poetry nor poetic prose. Essential Beckett, the Beckett of another mysterious little book like this, entitled The Lost Ones, written in the early 1970s….
The Lost Ones was a harrowing narrative of what might be called Beckett's version of Purgatory, a narrative of awful images of harrowing compulsions, so that one thought. If this is Purgatory, what must Hell be like? Or, one thought that Beckett might be saying that our existence on earth is itself Hell. But now, with this latest work, which is really a most poignant, most mysterious utterance, a writing of such beauty and at the same time so characteristic of so many of the nuances of savagely honest, and deceptively ingenuous questionings we have come to know in his writings. I think we can see something we may not have seen in Beckett before. I mean a kind of ruthless pity. It is a pity born of intense personal suffering, Beckett's suffering; but it is not only a suffering of the conscious mind, as we have seen before, the mind pushing by means of thought, of thought-experiments; so to speak, in which words are picked up and savored and examined for whatever possible meanings they might carry (which is never very much, as a matter of fact),… [it is] a pity touched now, for all its ruthlessness, with the hope of release at last, release from consciousness, thought, and existence, release into the void, the void Beckett's voice has approached patiently for decades, the void that waits for that consciousness which has tried to extricate itself from the net of words and things for so long.
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