Parents in
The Trashcan

Adorno learned from Endgame that it "prepares us for a state of affairs in which everyone who lifts the lid of the nearest trashcan can expect to find his own parents in it." This, he suggests, is the gerontology of late capitalism.

Beckett himself condemned this "over-reading," and told the actor Patrick Magee that Mann was "the kind of man who likes things coming to an end but doesn't want them to end just yet" --- a deeper insight than may at first appear.

--- Frank Kermode in a review of
The Long Life
by Helen Small (Oxford)
London Review of Books
13 December 2007