Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
Endgame and Act Without Words
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume III of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
"I am always deeply puzzled when people say of Beckett, 'Oh, he's so difficult!'–or avant garde, or complex, or . . . ambiguous. It is the profoundest nonsense, for Beckett is perhaps the most naturalistic playwright I know of, as well as the clearest and least obscure. The 'obscurity' resides in the assumption of obscurity. I know that if Beckett's outdoor plays were set on suburban terraces, and the indoor ones just inside those terraces, in suburban living rooms, everyone would be the wiser, certainly the less puzzled. We are most comfortable with the familiar." — Edward Albee, from his Introduction.
Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Footfall, Rockaby and others
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Everyman's Library)
by Samuel Beckett
from Everyman's Library
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary. It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure.This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue–delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty–of what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.
Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
Novels I of Samuel Beckett: Volume I of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime. He loved the tension in 'cogito ergo sum' and took a dim view of the connecting word, the 'ergo' in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with whom they were trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am." — Colm Toibin, from his Introduction
Molloy
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
Novels II of Samuel Beckett: Volume II of The Grove Centenary Editions (Works of Samuel Beckett the Grove Centenary Editions)
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
"A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender." — Salman Rushdie, from his Introduction
I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
by Samuel Beckett
from Grove Press
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