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...