When Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde met in Paris in the 1930s, both were living in abject poverty, and neither could have anticipated that--on the other side of World War II and the brutal occupation of France by the Nazis--they would each go on to be luminaries in their respective mediums: Beckett winning the Nobel Prize and becoming a bulwark of contemporary Western literature, and Van Velde holding exhibitions all over the world.Thirty years later, a younger author at the start of his career is introduced into the company of these two great pessimists--neither of whom make cooperative interview subjects, and each of whom represents, in his own way, a radical rejection of the common languages of his art.