The third time was released - Melis Bessri

The French contemporary writer Milès Besri, in her first book "The Inn of the Third Time: The Last Days of Mr. Beckett," offers a distinguished translation by Mohamed Ait Hana, a work that approaches biography as much as it distances itself from it. It does not write Samuel Beckett's life as we know it, nor does it attempt to extract a definitive truth about his final days, but creates a text similar to a windowless room, echoing Beckett's voice: tired,孤独, and burdened with a legacy of mystery. In a sparse style inspired by the spirit of the late Irish playwright, this first work by Besri earned her the Goncourt Prize for a debut work. She constructs a book based on short reflections and internal scenes, as if trying to grasp the last breath of a man who spent his life writing about waiting, decay, and silence. Besri weaves her work into narrative segments that intertwine reality and imagination. She follows Beckett's last days inside the care home in Paris, but does not provide a literal record; rather, a spiritual reading of a fatigued character standing on the edge of existence. Dialogue is minimal, sentences are short, and the language carries a haunting calmness reflecting Beckett's withdrawal from the world. Through nurses, visitors, and those moments when the writer faces his declining body, a slow and painful image of a man who knows his life has become just extra time is formed. Nevertheless, the text retains a human touch that illuminates this darkness, as if Beckett is still searching for a final sentence to say something no one has said before. The power of the book lies in its way of simulating Beckett's style without copying it, so that the narration itself becomes a reflection of the philosophy of the late writer. The rhythm is slow but tense, and each scene seems like part of an internal theater gradually fading away. Besri combines a fictionalized autobiography with a clever evocation of Beckett's major works like "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," indicating that the man lived and wrote in the same way: on the edge, between speech and silence, between continuation and fading out. At the same time, it offers the reader a rare opportunity to approach the fragility of a personality often surrounded by deliberate mystery. In the end, "The Inn of the Third Time" is not a book about Beckett's death, but about the meaning left by a writer when his life reaches its final sentence. A work that reflects on aging, withdrawal, and dignity in its last moments, and grants the reader a small window into a mind that was always trying to say what cannot be said. The question the book poses to its reader remains: Do we know writers more in their lives… or in the way they leave the world?