Company's fifty-seven pages make it rather an extended utterance from the master of compression whose appearances of the recent past have carried titles like Lessness, Ends and Odds, and Fizzles. What's more, it is a strikingly intimate book, arriving as something almost in the nature of a backstage pass, an invitation to the studio, and thus offering unique pleasures for admirers of Beckett's work. But this is a tale for careful telling, of necessity oblique. (p. 429)

[Beckett] has come to his readers as an unclamorous Ahab, a bowed affirmer, master of those who don't know, chronicler of the "little murmur of unconsenting man" (this from The Unnamable). Reading his stories, watching his plays, one learns to be attentive to small gestures, to the tiny victories which appear as patches in a fabric of loss: Vladimir gives his coat to the sleeping Estragon in Godot, and then walks...