John Sutherland

A Beckett fagend rescued from a bin

A review of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Echo’s Bones’. Considered too Beckettian for 1933, this recovered short-story is an allusive riot

Samuel Beckett in Paris in the 1970s [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 12 April 2014

Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For me they happened around the same time, aged 18. The dramatic initiation was a Colchester rep performance of Waiting for Godot, in 1956.

Twenty-five years after his first mature work was written Beckett had hit England with the burst of an unexploded wartime bomb.

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