Beckett...Schmeckett

Maybe you could say what you didn't like about Molloy?

For whatever it's worth, I'm most fond of his short prose.

i like the expelled/first love novellas, that collection, how they repeat the same theme is interesting and sort of musical tho only sort of

he was a right jock at college, which amused me greatly.

I have read him, a bit, in French. But you read the later work in English, even, and you can see how writing in a 2nd tongue focused him and allowed him to get away from his Joycean early work.

I read Molloy about three years ago and I guess my main gripe was that I just didn't give a shit about the narrator or the story. After a while I just didn't care what happened next so I gave up.

Also, and maybe I am just a plebe, but I am a huge fan of paragraphs.

I read Molloy about three years ago and I guess my main gripe was that I just didn't give a shit about the narrator or the story. After a while I just didn't care what happened next so I gave up.

Also, and maybe I am just a plebe, but I am a huge fan of paragraphs.

Beckett only has one narrator and one story, really. And he becomes less and less fond of paragraphs as you get later into his work (but they become much shorter, do you see).

So if you enjoyed the texture of the writing and the gallows humor (or at least the bleakness) then try the short prose, maybe Imagination Dead Imagine, his three-and-a-half page novel.

It sounds like you wouldn't really enjoy that though. If for some reason you really want to continue reading Beckett, I'd suggest Watt, whose main character at least feels a little different from the general Beckett hero, and which is perhaps easiest to enjoy for humor value.

You missed the punchline!

I skimmed through it again in a bookshop recently (an English version) and found Molloy a bit verbose at times for my liking (although the beginning is superbly staccato). The Unnameable really is the pinnacle of something, if I were to read it now it'd probably be in small amounts like a page or two a day. The standard rules of enjoyment for narrative fiction don't really apply to Beckett novels (empathising with character, plot etc), I guess at its best it's more like reading prose poetry, like Rimbaud's Season In Hell or something. Beckett really shaped my thinking and aesthetic attitude in my midtwenties, although I'm not sure I want to go back there now.

For the beginner, I'd recommend the four short stories collected together in a Penguin addition - First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End. These are really superb, a distilled Beckettian experience.

Well, not exactly. I mean, it's Beckett, so it's a little grim. But the last two sentences of The Unnameable do make it all worthwhile. As jz sez, it really is the pinnacle of something. And it knows it and (heh) gives it a name. It's grueling, but it's worth it.

deleuze refers to it multiple times e.g.

Ruins true refuge long last towards which so man false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless.

OMG yes. Absent the intellectual/emotional/physical trial of endurance that precedes it it just comes off as some cold-blooded pomo shit to say to a motherfucker before you pop a cap in his ass. Quotable, but worthless.

The only analog I can think of is Ashbery. Though obv. Ashbery doesn't share Beckett's sense of outrage.

But only The Unnameable illustrates the cost of... you know... doing what he sez...

So Beckett is known for writing in French as well as English. But he also translated Mexican poetry, this collection is assembled by Octavio Paz.

Really wanna read some Sor Juana.

Beckett's example is the primary reason I began writing poetry in my second language (Spanish)

http://bloodletters.tumblr.com/post/50461554338/belated

The Neruda collection I've been reading makes me want to pick up Spanish again. I probably have 30% of the vocab, used to be much higher.

I suppose you have that collection - good?

the Beckett? no, I've not read it, tho I'm curious...

Does anyone here like his poetry?

Gnome

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

i think most of his poetry was written early on when he was still under the sway of joyce but you can still see shades of his later sensibility in some of them. they're really visceral. eneug i and ii are p good i think, eneug i has this awesome stanza:

Above the mansions the algum-trees
the mountains
my skull sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind
bites like a dog against its chastisement.

Might give it a go then..