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Books

The blistering experience of writing about Samuel Beckett

21 February 2020

10:00 PM

21 February 2020

10:00 PM

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me: A Memoir Deirdre Bair

Atlantic Books, pp.347, £18.99

For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work — a genre with a solid pedigree — exert a peculiar and not entirely healthy fascination. We traipse through the sausage factory feeling sick to our stomachs yet weirdly hankering for a bite of the finished product.

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