Bloody bleeding brilliant!

Most of Beckett's plays follow one of three patterns - the Godot-like double act routine; the patterned, ritualistic plays; the plays where a man (sometimes a woman) looks back on, reflects on, or is confronted with his past. 'Krapp's Last Tape' is the most famous of these latter, although excellent variations include 'A Piece of Monologue' and 'Rough For Theatre 2'.

'That Time' is 'Krapp' taken to a manic, almost intolerable extreme. Krapp was divorced from his memories by the recordings of past selves. The protagonist of 'That Time' stands silent and mostly immobile listening to three conflicting monologues blaring at him from all sides. Each monologue relates different periods from his life, and express the usual Beckett themes of solitude, concealment, failure, nostalgia, the impossibility of relationships, the fragmentation of personality, the ravages of That Time.

What saves this from mere repetition is the astonishing rhythmic force of the language as the stories overlap, and the powerful beauty of each story, filled with haunting situations, memories, places, impressions and images that don't necessarily create or retrieve a life, which may not even true, or belonging to the Listener, but are certainly all any of us ever have left.

Alan Astro has done a magnificent job of reading Beckett's oeuvre. His analysis is acute and sometimes brilliant: I have never read a better piece on _Endgame_, and Astro's take on _Watt_ is incredible. There is no contemporary critic who has dealt with the primacy of the signifier in Beckett's work the way that Alan Astro has, is, and will continue (we hope) to do. His contribution to scholarship and performance cannot be overstated.

Once again, that poet of despair Samuel Beckett puts the reader through purgatory--or, in this case, an endless tract of mud, which our narrator muddles through for about 150 pages. Written entirely without punctuation, and sometimes a little obscure as to exactly what is going on, this book does not make for easy reading. It's worth the effort, though.

I almost didn't get through it myself. "Post-modern hocus-pocus," I thought sourly, as I read the first third. But it becomes oddly compelling, even poetic. Beckett's severely minimalistic style is fascinating; there's nothing in this book except the eerily dehumanized voice of its narrator, a lonely monologue that generates real poignancy. The effect is like hearing a voice from beyond the grave, and it haunts the mind like few conventionally written novels do.

_How It Is_ is another challenging, far-out epic by Samuel Beckett. Beckett pushes the far outer boundaries of what can be accomplished through literary fiction. _How It Is_ brings us to the most remote frontiers of artistic consciousness, pioneering new ground into the furthest reaches of the human mind. Join us for this epic voyage into the mind of a profoundly disturbed genius.

Beckett mastered standing on both sides of the borderline between convention and experiment. How It Is, both immediate in poignancy and resistant to a straight-forward reading, is wonderful testimony to this incredible ability. What is most wonderful about How It Is, and Beckett's late prose works in general, is how the form of the works speak just as loudly as the meanings of the words, if not louder. If anyone is heralding the death of the well-wrought novel, Beckett has demonstrated a controversal but brilliant way forward. We might baulk at its strangeness, but Beckett's is a very generous strangeness, one that requires work on the reader's part but will give the reader a unique experience of what a literary work can do.

_Murphy_ is dark, funny, and ponderous. While most Beckett fans know _Waiting for Godot_, this novella takes more of a Modernist bent that differs from the anticipatory post-Modernism of _Godot_. Beckett's black humor prevails, and the intellectual quest for love and its concrete definition develops; this idea carries over from the Joycean tradition begun in _Ulysses_.

What is fascinating about a work such as this is the absolute division of opinions regarding the importance of this book. Murphy is a style unto itself. It is a story without an internal plot. The character Murphy is fueled only by his desire to desire nothing, and in search of this goal seem to get nowhere. The real message of the book is based solely in the question of existence. While Beckett does borrow and steal quite a bit of idealology form other notables, his expression of the Mind/Body Split and the concepts of the Id, Ego, And Superego, leave me stunned and hollow inside. An intense read, I reccomend a single sitting of about 5 hours, and have a friend or two read it seperately, then discuss. It can change your life. P.S. Beckett would think it absurd that I feel this strongly about his book.

Murphy, as these other Amazon critics have suggested, is not Beckett's greatest work. Perhaps, though, it is his most lovable book, the last time he seemed to care so deeply about his characters. The final chapter even verges on sentiment-- and whoever accused Beckett of that?

This is Beckett before he became the Beckett of fame, before he began stripping away all excesses. This is Beckett before the war, when he was still writing in English, when he was still under the influence of Joyce. Others have noted the facts. But the truth is that Beckett, even in the adolescence of his genius, was a strong enough writer to forge his own consciousness.

A writer below commends the first sentence, and I concur. It's a beauty, recalling the verses of Ecclesiastes and foreshadowing the grim honesty of Beckett's future sentences.

For a reader curious about Samuel Beckett, Murphy is a good place to start.

It's hard to top Beckett when it comes to sheer density of prose. His trilogy here is considered one of the greatest sets of novels in the 20th century, and it's a rightly deserved reputation. Here Beckett does two neat tricks over the course of the three books, first he gradually strips the story down to its very essence, that being words and sentences and phrases to the point where the story is almost pure thought processes. Second, and this is probably harder, he manages the trick of taking an absolutely bleak view of life and making it absolutely hilarious. Through absurd situations, witty asides and just general black humor there are fewer works of literature that will literally have you laughing out loud while forcing you to confront the possible pointlessness of life. At no point is any of this easy reading, Beckett's prose can be politely described as relentless and the words just keep coming, maintaining an odd, jerky sort of rhythm that manages to pull you along so that the books read much faster than you might expect. And even though it's a trilogy mostly in spirit, there are some definite progressions from book to book. Molloy is the easiest to read and makes the most sense, even if its circuitiousness can be madly frustrating sometimes. And for some reason Beckett pulls an absolutely bizarre switch halfway through that I'm not smart enough to understand. But for the most part it's fairly accessable. Malone Dies is as bleak as the name implies and is probably the funniest in a black humour sort of way. I actually found this one easiest to understand though, but that's probably not the case with everyone. And then you hit the last book The Unnamable (which I saw someone jokingly once refer to as "The Unreadable") which brings Beckett to the absolute pinnacle of his style. There's barely any description to give the reader a visual image, and whatever descriptions there are always shift, never staying still. The novel is pure thought, a series of knotted sentences managing to convey a whole range of emotions and somehow achieving a strange beauty in the process. The final few words of the novel probably sum Beckett up just as much as anything else. These aren't novels you read for plot, but for the writing and his prose makes it all worthwhile. For those readers who don't mind doing a little work in their reading to be rewarded, Beckett is probably the place to go. This trilogy stands as one of the more uniquely beautiful pieces of the 20th century. The Nobel Prize was justly deserved.

Many do not even know that Beckett wrote novels; these are his finest. Molloy itself is a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness modernism--linking a simple vagabond named Molloy, with a lofty mind, to a sinister agent corrupt in thought sent to find Molloy. As the controlled agent gets closer to who Molloy is, he himself begins to fall apart and see life differently. Malone Dies is simply the mental construction of a dying man seeking to fill out his last living moments with three imaginative "stories." All three of these novels are immersed in words and are more an experience of language. The unnamable is truly that, nothing is specified or real, but in a fictive, engrossing manner, Beckett attempts to describe the unnamble in human life without ever naming it. Each of these books are amazing independently, but they deserve to be read as a whole as they form an engrossing and closed trilogy. If you read this, you will read language crafted by Beckett which communicates the unimaginable--thoughts close to everyman, but thoughts which you thought were inexpressible with language. Don't be wary of the language, this is a reading experience that will take you whole and speedily through the pages.

These three novels are the best of the 20th century.

They contain all the beauty, despair, and spareness that makes Beckett the patron writer of our century. They get at the core of what it means to be a self in the midst of the void, having, against one's will, a self's attendant thoughts, words, stories, and imagination. "I, say I. Unbelieving" says Beckett in the first line of The Unnamable, and you can believe him. These novels are as metaphysical as novels get, asking sincerely what it means to be. And asking just as sincerely if language can ever help us figure that out.

Each novel, with Molloy on his crutches, Malone in his death-bed, The Unnamable in his skull, is screamingly funny and cryingly horrible. Beckett's sense of the absurd and the ridiculous are only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge and overwhelming but strangely life-affirming pessimism, which helps us go on as we laugh at the world's collection of whimsies.

There are no novels better. There are few funnier. There are none containing more truth.

This is my favorite of Beckett's novels--many of the images and scenes are still etched in my mind.

If you haven't read Beckett's first full novel, Murphy, you shouldn't read Watt. Read Murphy first.

Watt serves as a bridge of sorts between Murphy and the trilogy. Murphy is more like other Modernist novels; the trilogy seems (to me, at least) more like Beckett's plays.

If you read Molloy, Malone Dies, or the Unnamable, and you found it a tad opaque, you may enjoy Watt more.

"Watt" is probably the most difficult text of Beckett's to get through-the apparent banality of plot and theme, the confusion of voice and later of language(by Watt at least, if not the reader), the rhythmic yet maddening combinatory inventories of personal posessions (a hallmark of "Molloy" in the trilogy to come) that comprises much of the dense often paragraphless prose, the fundamental personality-lessness of the titualar character, the novels appendix that hints at what might have been included but was not(except, of course, as an appendix, which ultimately includes it), all make the experience of Watt at times incredibly trying to get through. But it has beautiful, wise, and enigmatic passages enough to goad continued reading. Written while Beckett was active in the French Resistance during WWII, often while in hiding or on the run and always at night, the peculiarly drawn out trivialities of the life of the servant Watt become zen reflections on a life that cannot be lived with introspection, for that might yield the madness that is for this reader suggested by the seeming (if shadowy and vague) incarceration of Watt and Sam the narrator. Beckett is often accused of being too negative in his art, of aligning himself with the dread of the existentialists who shared his experience and context in midcentury France. I find that Beckett's dread is not some heroic answer to a banal and futile existence, but the only honest response one can have to an acknowledgement of "existence-in-itself"(whatever that means):to record a life of unknowing, to fail to represent it faithfully, to record the tension between the necessity of the record and its failure to be faithfully displayed, all with the "mirthless laugh...,the saluting of the highest joke,...the laugh that laughs--silence please--at that which is unhappy"(Watt,p.48). Desparate expression, with only the will to laugh, if lacking the joke.

The irony of Watt is that the readers are looking for a meaning and Beckett is trying to tell the reader that there is no meaning, but telling this has a meaning. Sense you ask, has it passed me by? No, further you understand read the more make it will sense. The frustration with this masterpiece (gasp) felt by critics and students is an example of the trouble with trying to categorize the novel, which by the way, Beckett intends (I feel). He intends to reveal life cannot be categorized, or at least should not be and the search for meaning is frustrating, but not meaningless. Am I contradicting myself? Good. I believe Watt is immeasurably profound, but I will not go on about it, because I'm sure some/most (close 'em and point) of what I'm saying is just self-interpretation. But. Pay attention, however, to these ideas: Meaninglessness, Circularity, Diminishment, Existence of God (knott (not), dog, etc), the significance of Beckett's form, insertions (whoops) of sex, and the importance of ending the novel with the waiting-room. This is a dense novel that will make your brain hurt, so you must be prepared before you read it, but if you do, it will make you appreciate the beauty and power of the human brain.

Even though Beckett is my favorite writer, I do not think that poetry was his best medium, and I think that this volume shows it all too well. Also, on a more technical note, this book does not include translations of all the French works into English (which bothers me) or, for all that matter, all the English works into French. That said, there are great moments here that poetry fans who are not necessarily also Beckett fans may enjoy. Beckett's first published work, an odd dissertation on Descartes called "Whoroscope," has a wonderfully Bohemian presence. I was most impressed, however, with the translations, which truly roar and pitch! The best are those of Apollinaire's "Zone," Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" (which Rimbaud himself would have loved, I think), and several maxims by the little-known French Revolutionary writer Sebastien Chamfort. When one reads of Rimbaud "foul(ing) unutterable Floridas," one is inclined to think, "What about the utterable Floridas?" This is one of the reasons poetry is so much fun.

These poems are not as intersting or important as his dramatic and prose works, but this volume has a few very good poems("Echo's Bones", "sanies I", "Saint Lo", "Whoroscope") and interesting trasnaltions of Apolloinaire & Rimbaud. But it is his adaptaions of the maxims of Sebastien Chamfort(called "Long after Chamfort") that give that characteristic mix of humor, despair, intimacy, isolation, confession and soul-searing. To wit, a few choice maxims:

"Better on your arse than on your feet, Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.

sleep till death healeth come ease this life disease"

I beg to differ with the previous reviewer. The greatness of this collection has to do with its connection to French poetry, and not to any connection to Beckett's stage work. The aphorisms are of minor interest, for example, and appeal to those seeking the expository. Rather, the volume's center of gravity is the translations of Eluard, which comprise many pages. These poems and their translations are breathtakingly beautiful, combining the intuitive and delicate play of sound and language of a Hart Crane (or a Dylan Thomas) with the experimentation (an occasionaly touch of Dada) and yet directness of a Rene Char. The few poems of Beckett himself are clearly following this lead -- if not directly emulating-- and are themselves beautiful and experimental more than they are meaningful. Witness the singsonginess of "Roundelay," or, for those who want something more comprehensible, the mixture of experiment and directness in "Mort de A.D." here a selection from the author's own translation from the French:

"je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse
entre le galet et la dune...

my way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds
and live the space of a door
that opens and shuts

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
amoing the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

I would like my love to die
and the rain to be raining on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning her who thought she loved me"

I have never found a volume of poetry more accessible to people, other than poems of Rilke and of Rumi. Beckett manages to combine a musicality of language with the communication of complex and gentle heart-messages. Other poets could take a lesson from Beckett: less is more. Not everything you commit to paper must find its way to the marketplace; having one great book of poetry makes you no less a formidable poet than one with a dozen. Quite the contrary.

A careful, highly readable and sometimes very amusing account of the life of the Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director and sports enthusiast. This gives a nuanced and sensitive account of the Irish background from which Beckett at first painfully extracted himself to a new life in France, but which he was always attached to sentimentally and creatively, never being too busy to meet with a young writer from Ireland, or to drink with old Irish friends and wax nostalgic about the Liffey. This book, while generally very admiring (Cronin has no time for the last novel), is actually more discerning and knowledgeable about Beckett's affairs emotional, literary and dramatic, especially in the later years of his career when Cronin was one of the first to write about him at length in the TLS and elsewhere, as well as to meet him and ask questions such as, "Krapp seems to think he had the possibility of happiness...?" To which Beckett calmly replied, "That doesn't mean he did though, does it?"

You get a fair sense of the man and his times, and a more modulated sense of his slow climb to success, even after "Waiting for Godot" made his name. Never has fame seemed less romantic. Cronin is that best of acquaintance-biographers - no fool, but not an assassin either. Fun as well as thorough. I can't think what will come to light to make a better biography possible.

For a pretty fat bio, I found this a surprisingly easy and swift read. Cronin, who certainly knows the lay of the land, the type of people, and even some of the actual folks Beckett knew, seems a fair and judicious biographer. I found the book most useful in charting Beckett's development as an artist from the callow "knowingness" of his early novels and poems to the wry despair of his mature work. One is impressed both by Beckett's inconsistent touchiness about the handling of his work by adapters, and by his quiet generosity with near strangers as well as friends. Cronin includes plenty of delightful trivia, from quotes ("I am not a philosopher; one can only speak of what is in front of one and that is simply a mess") to the fact that Beckett always accented the first syllable of Godot.

This is a valiant attempt to understand the man and the artist. The slow and unconventional evolution of Beckett's art is well described. This biography is, I feel, honest [in as much as any biography can be such] and does not mythologize. Sad that in Beckett's last days he appeared to be consumed with remorse.

Stirrings Still is also available as Beckett Short No. 11 where it is paired with What Is the Word. Stirrings Still, a study of death and movement - constrained, absence and free, I have already reviewed. What Is the Word is a short and effective piece on aphasia as, perhaps, brought on by a stroke. Both pieces are brilliant, vintage Beckett.

This is a book I recommend only if you are interested in the experimental use of language or interested in everything Beckett.

I found I needed to read this small volume multiple times before the repeated images, the disjoint non-sentences, the crisp objectiveness of the language began to congeal into an interesting study of self-awareness. Even the first reading leaves one knowing they are in the hands of a master wordsmith. Well worth the time but certainly not for everyone.

What th???? thoughts, fearful examination of the insanity and ecstacy of self-refective perception. disjointed. razors, withered weathered fields of obsessive compulsion