My copy of this book is secondhand (like most of my books); the careful cursive inscription on its half title page indicates that it was formerly owned by Leonie Scudds (Form Six). Apart from those details, there are two handwritten annotations, one on that front page, the other about halfway through, both piquant:
The characters talk for a while + get no where
making us wait + see what he is leading up to. How many conversations are significant? yes. same here.
I've never read Beckett before, though I've seen a couple of excellent productions of his plays in the last couple of years or so (Endgame and Happy Days), and got a lot out of Godot despite the vast amount of cultural detritus that has accumulated around the idea of it. The play is oblique in its meanings, but strikingly direct in other ways; reading it, one is left with an overwhelming sense of entropy, repetition, absence, failures of meaning and understanding, an uncaring universe. It's remarkable in its artistry, in the way that it lays out and revisits its themes over and over (with repetition itself one of those very themes) without ever seeming overdetermined, in its understanding of the specific and the universal and how they necessarily relate to each other, in its sustained worldview and in the balance between the tragic and the comic that it achieves throughout.
