Max McGuinness

"Beckett being who he was, this is no conventional memoir... it is bizarrely charming." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

André Bernold maintained a friendship with Samuel Beckett until the writer's death in 1982. Meeting in the cafés and streets of Paris, with conversations noted and hesitancies observed, this book reveals the gradual exfoliation of a personality across the last decade of Beckett's life, as one intellectual appraises another.

This is a charming and sympathetic study of one of literature's most opaque writers and of his interests in music, philosophy, visual arts and the spoken arts.

In shedding sympathetic light on a famously private Irishman abroad, these verbal exposures complement John Minihan's contemporaneous and intimate black-and-white photographs, taken in the same environs.