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Title: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0-8021-5091-8 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.41 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Comedy and compassion in a world of fictions.
Comment: THREE NOVELS BY SAMUEL BECKETT: MOLLOY MALONE DIES THE UNNAMABLE. By Samuel Beckett. 414 pages. New York: Grove Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8021-5091-8 (pbk).
There are many good reasons for reading Beckett's Trilogy. There is, in the first place, his beautifully clear and supple prose, a prose that moves with ease from the simple and straightforward treatment of everyday matters through to passages of intense lyrical beauty, or to equally moving outbursts of extreme brutality and obscenity. There is also Beckett's wonderful sense of humor, and readers will often find themselves chuckling at his eccentric characters and their zany carryings on. There is the unique effect produced by the general strangeness of his novels, with their odd characters moving through vividly realized landscapes which seem real enough but in which many of the happenings are either inexplicable or left unexplained.
There are also such things as his compassionate treatment of animals, for although Beckett seems most of the time to have little love for his fellow men, the intensity of his love and respect for the humbler creatures of the earth - donkeys, sheep, pigs, bees, birds, etc., - can be overpowering. Here, for example, is Beckett in 'Malone Dies' (p.304) describing, in his powerful and beautiful prose, a grey hen : ". . . this big, anxious, ashen bird, poised irresolute on the bright threshold, then clucking and clawing behind the range and fidgeting her atrophied wings, soon to be sent flying with a broom and angry cries and soon to return, cautiously, with little hesitant steps, stopping often to listen, opening and shutting her little bright black eyes"
There is here a total identification with a creature we would normally have difficulty identifying with, and a very real compassion. Like Molloy,Moran, and Malone, the hen is trapped: trapped in the universe - and trapped in a body. Like them, too, it desires happiness and is averse to suffering. It is experiencing the agony of incarnation, the agony of being in a body. It suffers from heat, cold, thirst, hunger, fear, desire, confusion, frustration, loss, pain, injury, terror, and ultimately death. It also endures many of the other afflictions that we too must somehow suffer through and try to survive - all the while uncertain as to how we got here, why we are here, and where we are going, and desperately searching for some meaning, some explanation, some way out.
Beckett is not easy to read. His books demand real stamina. They give us a world in which, despite its occasional hilarity, none of us can feel truly comfortable for nothing in it makes much sense. For Beckett, as for the Buddhists, a continuous self is a mere illusion and has no real existence - hence the indeterminacy of his characters, and the melting of Molloy into Moran, Malone into Macmann, etc. Ultimately unreal, and thus without meaning, they move painfully, but also comically, through a world in which the link between cause and effect has been broken - a world which is itself therefore meaningless, and in which redemption can come only through art since in a world emptied of absolute meanings there can only be fictions. While each of us is unconsciously busy creating the fiction which is our self, and helping to sustain the larger fiction which is society, Beckett was consciously creating his own fictions. But they are all fictions and all ultimately without meaning. Or perhaps one could say that the meaning is that there is no meaning.
Despite this general meaningless, however, readers who patiently work through these books will find much to reward them. They offer us a true, though grotesquely exaggerated, vision of life, albeit one in which there is much that is grim and disgusting. They also offer a marvelous field for the play of Beckett's comic genius, and he can rarely resist poking fun at the kind of mind produced by the massive organized pedantry which passes for education in the modern world. And finally, we should not forget those moments, more precious for their rarity - moments such as Molloy's vision of the young woman on the beach who wishes to help him - when there is an inexplicable intrusion of sheer goodness and beauty into his grim world. Perhaps Beckett was not quite the misanthrope and pessimist he liked to pretend. He was certainly one of the wittiest, and beneath his tough intellectual carapace there is a warmth and love he never did succeed in wholly disguising.
The Grove Press edition of Beckett's Trilogy is printed in an ugly heavy blunt font; comes with that special contribution to the modern reader's hell - one of those cheap-and-nasty glued spines which split easily; and (like many of Beckett's books) is riddled with typographical errors and misprints. Potential readers would probably be better off finding the physically more handsome and durable Everyman edition, though whether it offers a more accurate text I don't know.
Rating: 5
Summary: "...the high-water mark of...Modernism"
Comment: The quotation reproduced above comes from the inside front flap of the dustcover of the Everyman's Library edition, and while such flaps in Everyman rarely reveal much about the contents of the books they cover, this quotation seems quite appropriate.
People seem to be upset by Beckett's techniques in writing these novels. Some have even alleged that Beckett (gasp!) has attempted to write a novel without any features of a normal novel. This misses the point of modernism and, while some reviewers may prefer the linearity of the traditional novel (while not, of course, being bad at literary criticism), this misconception of linearity must be corrected. Whereas writers like Conrad (even though Conrad never admitted being an Impressionist writer) cast a haze over his prose desciptions to obscure his readers' vision, modernists give us crisp clarities, but provide us with only the minutest of details. Here, we see the influence of abstract art on literature--especially the dynamism of Marcel Duchamp. By this I mean that modernists attempted to show all stages of motion at once, as in Duchamp's famous painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2"--the nude is depicted as a brown blur, and Duchamp shows all stages of the nude's descent. In modernist literature, there are frequent references to earlier events, and there are references to future events. This is evident in _Ulysses_, an epic work of modernism by James Joyce, from whom Beckett himself learned numerous literary techniques.
But also, we see the strong influence Proust had on Beckett. In what has been called, by some critics, the greatest novel written (A la recherche du temps perdu, or Remembrance of Things Past), Proust attempted to write a novel in which the main theme was memory. Proust takes a bite of a Madeleine pastry, and through association, remembers all his life when this bite invokes a childhood memory. But Beckett writes often of people who can remember hardly anything at all: in _Waiting for Godot_, Vladimir and Estragon can barely remember past yesterday. What is meant by this? I believe, Beckett is saying that in this modern (and, by his later career, postmodern) world, we can find nothing that will invoke memory. Our childhoods do not contain high times with tea and Madeleines. Furthermore, his characters do not have anything, even if their childhoods did have the comforts of Proust's (which is highly unlikely).
People are also often startled by the stream-of-consciousness technique used by modernists. But with Beckett, this technique was a means of filling the silence of loneliness. Molloy sees only this man who comes to take away the pages and give him money. Modern humanity is alone; therefore, humans mutter to themselves to pass the time and fill the void.
In works of modernism, we find the constant themes of dynamism memory, and the loneliness of humankind; especially in Beckett's work. I hope that this review has been helpful to those who feel intimidated by Beckett's work: sometimes a few small bits of criticism can get you thinking well and deeply when reading a work.
Rating: 2
Summary: I Couldn't "go on"
Comment: I need to write this review quickly so I don't lose some of the thoughts that I am having. I feel empty inside. I have just put down _The Trilogy_ without finishing the last 80 or so pages of "The Unnamable." I feel as if I have wasted the last week trying to find meaning in a book that from its very outset proclaims it has no meaning.
Each section ("Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable") gets progressively worse. It is an obvious gradual progression from life to death. This sounds as if it would make an interesting read until the plot is qualified. Nothing can be taken as literal truth throughout the entire series. Each "narrator" is constantly complaining that they don't remember certain things, and that it is "tedious" for them to be writing them down.
"Molloy" is basically displays the idea that life has no logical order, and that it is futile to resist this notion. This is the best section. Still though, I felt that it was a poor pastiche of Franz Kafka.
"Malone Dies" is about the despair that one feels as they die. Malone (maybe?) occupies his time by writing stories that have no meaning or truth to them.
"The Unnamable" is, to an uneducated dilettante like me, an incompressible load of ramblings. I didn't finish this section, but I did read half of it, certainly that should be enough time for Mr. Beckett to begin and explain his point. But wait...that's just it...there is no POINT! Yes that's right. He wrote a trilogy with no plot, dialogue or structure, in order that you would realize that life has no meaning. This is a fine artistic statement; however, it must be defended or displayed in a manner in which the reader wants to "go on." Mr. Beckett could have done this in a novella, not a 400 page trilogy. Furthermore, he already displayed this same concept, the endless search for meaning and the impossibility of finding it, in _Waiting for Godot_, in a much more artistic and compelling way.
I have not read enough of his work to pass judgment on Mr. Beckett as an artist. However, this is not really a book I feel guilty about not finishing.
Post Script- I hate to do this, but I must wax philosophic for a moment. Although it seems more intelligent to say otherwise, life is not pointless. Regardless of your religious or moral footing, you should feel lucky. How can one say life has no point, when life is all there is? What exactly are you comparing it to? What would have a point? It isn't impossible to love, and if you've felt that for anyone, a parent, grandparent or lover, wasn't the love you felt for them worth the more unpleasant things we all have to deal with? Art should affirm life, not deny it.
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Title: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett, S. E. Gontarski ISBN: 0802134904 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Endgame and Act Without Words by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150241 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1970 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Murphy by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802150373 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1957 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
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Title: Watt by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 080215140X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1959 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802130348 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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