About The Book

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Praise

“Samuel Beckett shows us a mystery outside the grasp of any other dramatist. The feeling Beckett expresses on the stage is a note heard nowhere else in contemporary drama. . . Endgame, so mournful, so distraught, is a magnificent theatrical experience.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Outside lies a world of death. Inside the room the blind, impervious Hamm sits in a wheelchair while his lame servant, Clov, scuttles about obeying his orders. Each depends fractiously on the other: Hamm alone knows the combination of the larder while Clov is his master’s eyes and last remnant of human contact. The only other survivors are Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell, who squat in dustbins upstage and die during the play.” —Michael Billington, Guardian

“It is his remarkable ability to mix beauty, imagination, vitality and wry humor that transforms Beckett from a mere dispenser of meaningless gloom into a dramatic poet.” —New York Post

“[Beckett’s work is a] continual search for a special kind of perfection, a perfection manifest in his unfailing stylistic control and economy of language, his remorseless stripping away of superfluities.” —A. Alvarez

“Beckett’s language falls once again on its feet, like a cat.” —The New Republic

Excerpt

HAMM:
Clov!

CLOV:
Yes.

HAMM:
Nature has forgotten us.

CLOV:
There’s no more nature.

HAMM:
No more nature! You exaggerate.

CLOV:
In the vicinity.

HAMM:
But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!

CLOV:
Then she hasn’t forgotten us.