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Title: Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0-8021-3235-9 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: A depressingly overrated waste of paper
Comment: "Mercier and Camier" is the kind of book that people say is great when inside they know it's pretty much terrible. Samuel Beckett gives us a plotless tale of two guys walking around a city, acting like idiots, taking pleasure from a woman's gruesome car accident, and then killing a cop. Unlike comparable 'bad guy' protagonists - such as in "A Clockwork Orange" - Mercier and Camier are not interesting, complex, sympathetic, memorable, or worth our time. And make no mistake, these guys are bad - the fact that they act like brain-damaged five-year-olds doesn't change that.
I think Beckett intended them to represent the mixture of boredom, madness, and detachment which is an essential part of most people's psyche (especially the thoughtful), but he does not achieve this goal in the least. There are a million books which express the desperation and hollowness of life, with a tinge of humor (and indeed there are a few moments of this book which are humorous, or at least attempts at humor). This is perhaps one of the most overrated of this sort of book.
Beckett's writing style is unique and, for the most part, good. My favorite line in this book came at the end of a lengthy descriptive paragraph: "End of descriptive passage." But the actual substance of this book does not live up to the promise provided by the style. While I tend to love the strange and the unique in art (especially books about people who seem at once hideously abornal and yet universal), "Mercier and Camier" proves that not all books about distinctively bizarre characters are good.
You'd be better off seeing "Waiting for Godot," or better yet, read something by Shakespeare.
Rating: 5
Summary: Waiting for Poe
Comment: Written in 1946, "Mercier and Camier" was Samuel Beckett's first postwar novel and his first in French. "Mercier and Camier" captures the time of depression and indecision in Beckett's life. It continues the line of vagabond heroes which begins with Belacqua in "More Pricks Than Kicks" and continues with "Murphy" and "Watt." They are the first of his vaudevillian couples, and this novel is in many ways the precursor of "Waiting for Godot." If there is a chronological line of development in his writing, "Mercier and Camier" surely marks the first tentative approach toward what Beckett calls the "mature" fiction of "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable." In the trilogy, Beckett relentlessly reduces his characters from pitiful creatures with few possessions--a hat, a pot, a stub of pencil--to voices, who have only the inner torments of their past life to sustain their present existence, doomed to repeat themselves until finally, even the voice, their last vestige of humanity, is stilled. There is no discernible setting, no tie with any real existence, and seemingly, no plot.
In "Mercier and Camier," the journey shapes the plot as the two men parade on an endless quest. Despite its somberness, it is in some ways a warm and funny book, occasionally tinged with stinging sarcasm. There are secondary characters, skillfully and swiftly delineated, so bizarre that even the two oddities of the title are struck by their madness. Mercier and Camier are otherworldly figures themselves, but they need the trappings of the real world in order to give their story coherence, and this is no doubt part of the reason why Beckett chose to abandon them and go on to the Malones and Malloys of his later fiction.
Just about this time, Beckett discovered that writing was for him the most intensely personal experience possible, depending not on verbal virtuosity or on the careful construction of the traditional novel. For him, creation satisfied only when he could plumb the depths of his unconscious, find an incident from his own life, and then work to conceal biography within the framework of his creative consciousness, changing dimensions of time and space according to the whim of his fictional voices. He reduces life to a series of tales, told first by one, then another (perhaps the same) voice, but all the voices are his.
Beckett perfected this method of writing novels when he discovered what he has called the most important revelation of his literary career--the first person monologue. He found he could create a multi-dimensional universe through the use of a voice telling a story. At the same time, this relentless voice could reveal character in its most desperate loneliness, stripping it as never before in contemporary fiction.
Written just before "Molloy," "Mercier and Camier" stands on the threshold of Beckett's mature fiction. There are large chunks of dialogue which he later transferred directly into Godot, but here speech is encumbered by a plot with progression and movement, albeit circuitous and often contradictory. There is a narrator, as in "Murphy" and "Watt," who occasionally intrudes to inject an acerbic comment and who thinks nothing of slowing down, speeding up, or otherwise circumventing the progress of the "pseudo-couple" (as they are called in "The Unnamable").
"Mercier and Camier" is about voluntary exile, much like Beckett's own. While it can be read as the odyssey of Beckett and the other young Irishmen who went to Paris in the 1930's hoping to gain the same success as their countryman of an older generation, James Joyce, it can also be read as two aspects of the personality of Beckett himself. Before his departure, he had been easily recognizable in Dublin by his shapeless, dirty raincoat, several sizes too large. He was plagued by recurring idiosyncratic cysts. When he wrecked his own car, he had continuous problems with his bicycle. In a drunken moment, he lost his favorite hat, which he mourned long afterwards.
It is the raincoat, however, which best symbolizes the final division of his first 30 years from the rest of his life, as well as this novel's place in his canon: when he left Dublin, Beckett threw his raincoat away, just as Mercier and Camier, after throwing theirs away, walk off into their own uncertain future, looking back now and again at the heap on the ground--unwilling to go on with it, but hesitant to abandon it...
Rating: 5
Summary: Novella of Waiting for Godot
Comment: Mercier and Camier are two, possibly gay or possibly friends, walking philosophies. Beckett's gone beyond the boring term, "existentialism" and given something to fiction that Sartre would wish he could have. Sartre is also a genius, as a philosopher, primarily, and of course his Roads to freedom shoud be read, but Beckett is simply the better, more imaginative, more experimental writer. Excellent conversation and banter betwixt the two Odyseii, reminiscent of Vladimir and Estagon's. Translated by Beckett himself, also a plus.
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Title: Murphy by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150373 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1970 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
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Title: How It Is by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150667 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802134262 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Watt by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 080215140X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1970 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: More Pricks Than Kicks by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 080215137X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: June, 1972 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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