Beckett después de tantos años

Beckett después de tantos años
En Academia, me dice una profesora del Punjab que, qué coincidencia, también ella ha escrito un libro sobre Beckett:

Yeah, isn't that a coincidence, Samuel Beckett in one shot, in Chandigarh and Zaragoza, Spain! Well, it's years since I wrote anything about Beckett, and then it was only in Spanish, sorry about that. I wrote mainly about the novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, fascinating stuff), but also more generally about reflexive and metafictional structures in Beckett's writing. Another coincidence: those years, it must have been more than twenty years ago, I met a woman who had written a thesis on Beckett... and eventually we would end up getting married and having children, not that Beckett's a model for that! At the time I took a structuralist-formalist-aesthetic approach to Beckett's work, and of course it's rewarding, being he's so original in that respect. But later I became more interested in the autobiographical/cultural/contextual approach. From that point of view, an obvious context for Godot would be of course the Second World War, the French occupation, collaboration, its atmosphere of existential futility, etc. Beckett deals with the personal, the historical and the metaphysical in one move, and he can be read in so many ways. I wonder which is your approach from an Indian perspective. Please send me the reference of your book, and I will include it in an online bibliography I keep compiling. And keep on enjoying Beckett, but don't keep him "company" at his low level of optimism! (He doesn't care for children, that's one of his limits). Cheers, Navdeep!

Pronto hará veinte años de la muerte de Beckett, por cierto, pero era una muerte vivida por anticipado, en plan "no sé cuándo morí". Sin sorpresas póstumas previstas.

Sobre la doctora Penas, sí—oí hablar de ella por vez primera a cuenta de unas jornadas sobre Beckett, en otro aniversario. Yo estaba haciendo la mili pero me las arreglé para asistir. De ella me chocó el nombre, sobre todo habida cuenta del contexto. Se la esperó allí, pero, como Godot, no acudió a la cita ni en el primer ni en el segundo acto... por asunto familiar grave.

Ephemera et aeterna

—oOo—