Ambitious Beckett biography covers a broad spectrum

‘The best part of a writer’s biography,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.” Jennifer Birkett, in her new study of the work of Samuel Beckett, would seem to agree: “Human truth, for Beckett,” she notes in her introduction, “is not merely a matter of history, but of style”; and she goes on to observe that “Beckett’s story is the story of ...