Conversation with Maylis Besserie

Maylis Besserie won this year’s prestigious Goncourt ‘prize for a first novel’ with “Le Tiers Temps”, a title that comes from the name of the retirement home where Samuel Beckett lived out the last year of his life. The retirement home was situated in the down-at-heel fourteenth arrondissement of Paris and, as Besserie herself underlines, it was as if Beckett had come to live in one of his own stage productions peopled with strange, unhinged individuals, waiting for the end of days. Filled with voices – from the virtuosity of Beckett’s to the clinical language of the medical voices – and reminiscences, as well as black humour in the face of old-age and delight in Beckett’s bilingualism, this beautifully measured novel is a pleasure to read.

Maylis Besserie will share passages from “Le Tiers Temps” with us this evening before being interviewed, in English, by academic Clíona Ní Ríordáin.