It's also there in the juxtaposition, in the quote given above, of "quick" and "death" — "quick" being, of course, another word for "alive". You begin to see how his editor might have started dabbing his forehead.

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Readers would have been able then to connect the vomit with that which dogs are said to return to, "exuviae" is easily inferrable from context, and "randy pollen" is wonderful; but would many have known that "caisse-poitrine" is not only the French phrase for "rot-gut", as in cheap booze, but also — as the footnotes helpfully tell us — slang for "the active partner in homosexual fellatio"? Which adds another unhelpful, from a propriety-respecting viewpoint, layer of meaning to "bring it off". But "Echo's Bones" is itself almost insanely allusive, even in comparison to Beckett's other works.

To summarise the plot, barely: Location changes dreamlike, at whim; we are either in a mushroomy field in gorgeous countryside, or a Parisian room, or by a seashore or a graveyard.

An Echo in the Bone

As Beckett said earlier in his essay on Joyce's Finnegans Wake , "his writing is not about something; it is that something itself". What saves this from being little more than a previously roped-off plot in which scholars and students can now fossick excitedly is that one of the elements that Beckett could never resist was humour.


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The density of "Echo's Bones" may be mind-bending at times, but we are never far from a joke, either in the form of a bit of snappy dialogue from Belacqua or his interlocutors, or as a spark generated by the pressure Beckett puts his language under. We have our faults, but ideas is not one of them. But Beckett always took care to undermine such moments. So this is a wonderful curiosity, which points, teasingly, both towards and away from Beckett's development.

Echo Round His Bones

Its appearance does nothing to diminish his reputation; quite the opposite. Consider the justly celebrated conclusion to the story "Dante and the Lobster", in which Belacqua realises, with horror, that lobsters in s Dublin at least were cooked by being boiled alive: Topics Short stories Rereading. Fiction Samuel Beckett Publishing features. Order by newest oldest recommendations. In An Echo in the Bone, the seventh volume, Gabaldon continues the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his twentieth-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall.

Jamie Fraser, former Jacobite and reluctant rebel, is already certain of three things about the American rebellion: Claire Randall knows that the Americans will win, too, but not what the ultimate price may be.

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Because the future of the MacKenzie family in the Highlands is mysteriously, irrevocably, and intimately entwined with life and death in war-torn colonial America. With stunning cameos of historical characters from Benedict Arnold to Benjamin Franklin, An Echo in the Bone is a soaring masterpiece of imagination, insight, character, and adventure—a novel that echoes in the mind long after the last page is turned.

From the Hardcover edition.


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