BOOKS
471
after "The Snow" episode in
The Magic Mountain,
but it just isn't there.
Despite this shortcoming, however, Handke must be acknowledged
as one of the major voices in contemporary fiction today. By render–
ing, in narrative terms, questions of ultimate meaning, value, and
the relationship between the psyche and empirical reality, he poses
the fundamental issues preoccupying current, postmodern philosophy.
And , by amplifying their resonance in the aching dislocation and
uncertainty of one individual's experience, he leads us all onward, if
not yet to a final coming home.
KATHLEEN AGENA
AN ODD FRIENDSHIP
DIALOGUE IN THE VOID: BECKETT AND GIACOMETTI. By Matti
Megged.
Lumen. $7.95.
A thorough study of Beckett's works, such as we still do
not have, will have an awful lot of explaining to do, at least in the ab–
sence of an annotated
Collected:
the prose is replete with allusions and
unfamiliar words , all of which get the student working hard on some–
times marginal things. This done, the study would have to introduce
and explore some of his favorite concepts, such as pseudo-couple,
quaqua, Belacqua bliss, asylum, microcosm, text, and nothing, with
special attention to his little monograph on Proust, repudiated by
Beckett (it has never appeared in French), but useful as an index to a
state of mind which, although set aside, was seminal, and helps the
reader to traffic with the use of enigma in such books as
Watt
and
How It Is.
Matti Megged does little of this, intent as he is on one of those
affinities brought out, in art, by Andre Malraux's
The Voices
of
Silence.
Now Beckett is as tough a nut to crack in seventy pages as Proust was
for Beckett himself, and even tougher when half of the envisioned
space goes to Giacometti, himself a taxing subject . All that would
justify such a tight braiding of topics would be a keen, chronic under–
standing of both men's work and the revelation that they have much
in common . Well , Megged has, and, as he reveals, the affinity is
nothing forced ; you wonder why no one has pointed it out before.
