The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956
The scholarly apparatus attached to these letters is impeccable. The worst to be said of the massive research appended is that it fractures any sense of an unfolding personal narrative of the kind one gathers from reading the letters of Chekhov, say, or Rosa Luxemburg; what does "go forward" is Beckett's steady refinement of an aesthetic, his insistence on a severe, pristine, ascetic literary practice. —Gary Indiana