After Beckett published his last full-length novel, How It Is (1964), his fiction writing took the form of only short prose pieces in French and English.
This short book was the first to focus on five such works he published between 1965 and 1970 - Imagination Dead Imagine; Enough; Ping; Lessness; and The Lost Ones. Finney analyzes each work from a different vantage point - the mania for disorder, the artist's excavation of the humans' suffering interior, his figurative use of light and dark, his paradoxical representation of changelessness as continuous change, the way the perceiver infects what is perceived, the impossible search for artistic failure, and his preoccupation with form. The book incorporates Beckett's answers to the author's written questions to him. Since How It Is offers a lucid commentary and analysis of these condensed and powerful compositions written by the outstanding writer of his time.
After Beckett published his last full-length novel, How It Is (1964), his fiction writing took the form of only short prose pieces in French and English. This short book was the first to focus on five such works he published between 1965 and 1970 – Imagination Dead Imagine; Enough; Ping; Lessness; and The Lost Ones. Finney analyses each work from a different vantage point – the mania for disorder, the artist’s excavation of the humans’ suffering interior, his figurative use of light and dark, his paradoxical representation of changelessness as continuous change, the way the perceiver infects what is perceived, the impossible search for artistic failure, and his preoccupation with form. The book incorporates Beckett’s answers to the author’s written questions to him. Since How It Is offers a lucid commentary and analysis of these condensed and powerful compositions written by the outstanding writer of his time.