Volume 9, Number 10 · December 7, 1967
Saint Beckett
By Matthew Hodgart
Stories and Texts for Nothing
by Samuel Beckett
Grove, 140 pp., $5.00
'There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I had never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the side-walk shouldn't count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma….' No one who has read any of Beckett's works will be surprised to find that the first story in the latest term of the series begins with such desperate mathematics, presumably an emblem of the incommensurability of experience, as the permutations of Murphy's biscuits and Molloy's stones are emblems of the limit of human possibilities.
Review, 2270 words
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