Echo's bones

Beckett, Samuel2014

Books, Manuscripts

Find it!
Remove Echo's bones from your current list Save Echo's bones to your current list

Total copies: 1

Available: 1

Availability by location

Place reservation

Holding details

Location	Collection	Call number	Status/Desc
WEST RYDE	ADULT FICTION	F CLASSIC BECKClassics	Available

Echo's Bones was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the 'recessional' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks , published in 1934. The story was written at the request of the publisher, but was held back from inclusion in the published volume. Echo's Bones has remained unpublished to this day, and the present edition will situate the work in terms of its biographical context, its Joycean influences, and as a vital link in the evolution of Beckett's early work. The editor, Mark Nixon, is director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. The story’s plot is deliberately staccato and unhinged. Belacqua is cast up from the grave, up and about in the dust of the world, back at his old games in the dim spot, and finds himself sitting on a fence smoking cigars. He has a brief philosophical assignation over garlic and rum with a prostitute, before being kidnapped by the grotesque Lord Gall, an impotent golfing aristocrat of monstrous proportions who carries Belacqua on his shoulders up a tree, where he persuades him to impregnate his wife and meet his pet ostrich. Belacqua then returns to his grave for a ferociously esoteric conversation with the groundsman trying to rob it.