The Capital of The Ruins

"The Capital of the Ruins" is a short piece of reportage by Samuel Beckett written in 1946. Originally written for broadcast by Irish radio, it deals with the Irish hospital in St. Lô. The title of the piece derives from a booklet of photographs of the bombed-out city entitled St. Lô, Capital des Ruines, 5 et 7 Juin 1944. The text is dated 10 June 1946 signed by Samuel Beckett, but there remains a controversy whether it was broadcast or not. It was discovered among the archives of Radio Telefís Éireann in 1983 and published in 1986 by Eoin O'Brien in The Beckett Country, and later that same year in As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers. It is also collected in Beckett's Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, published in 1995.

The prose of Samuel Beckett
Novels:
  • Dream of Fair to Middling Women
  • Murphy
  • Watt
  • Mercier and Camier
  • Molloy
  • Malone Dies
  • The Unnamable
  • How It Is
Short stories:
  • “Assumption”
  • “Sedendo et Quiescendo”
  • “Text”
  • “A Case in a Thousand”
  • “First Love”
  • “The Expelled”
  • “The Calmative”
  • “The End”
  • “Texts for Nothing”
  • “From an Abandoned Work”
  • “The Image”
  • “All Strange Away”
  • “Imagination Dead Imagine”
  • “Enough”
  • “Ping”
  • “Lessness”
  • “The Lost Ones”
  • “Fizzles”
  • “Heard in the Dark 1”
  • “Heard in the Dark 2”
  • “One Evening”
  • “As the story was told”
  • “The Cliff”
  • “neither”
  • “Stirrings Still”
  • “Company”
  • “Ill Seen Ill Said”
  • “Worstward Ho”
Short story collections:
  • More Pricks Than Kicks
  • Stories and Texts for Nothing
  • The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989
Non-fiction:
  • Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam)
  • Disjecta
  • Proust
  • "The Capital of the Ruins"

Famous quotes containing the words capital and/or ruins:

    “It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death-warrant; but ... it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in the joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects.”
    —Sydney Smith (1771–1845)

    “The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.”
    —Anita Loos (1893–1981)