Weird and interesting to read.

Malone Dies is the second book of Beckett's “Trilogy”, three novels of the late 1940s written in an obsessive first-person narration and brooding on the tedious trivialities of life in order to reveal the absurdity of existence.

Here we find the notebook of one Malone, an old man living out his last days bedridden in what appears to be a nursing home of some sort, giving the world his farewell by making an inventory of his meagre possessions and keeping himself entertained with a series of improvised stories. This is not merely a story about one oldtimer. For Beckett, the dying old geezer is a sort of Everyman, since we all are moving inextricably towards death no matter what our age.

Beckett’s view of life's absurdity sometimes takes the form of a cock and bull story, such as the multipage description in one of Malone's tales of a wayfarer getting thoroughly soaked in a rainstorm. That said, there is nothing here to rival the “sucking stones” passage of the first volume of the Trilogy, Molloy

Much of Beckett’s musings are on the frailty of the human body, the fact that ultimately we are all sad sacks of oozing fluids and weakening muscles. Sexuality is as a rule treated as something grotesque. These novels were written in French first, and only later translated into English. That explains their vulgarity, a recourse to four-letter words that was still unusual in English-literature of the time.

Beckett’s trilogy is rather out of tune with our modern, short-attention-span era. With its hundreds of pages of dense stream-of-consciousness writing, where each sentence so inextricably flows out of the one before, a bored reader cannot skim because he would soon lose the plot entirely. However, for fans of modernism this is a work that is well worth tackling, and it is full of memorable passages. I liked Malone Dies considerably more than Molloy, because unlike the unsympathetic bum and detective of the first volume, the reader comes to sympathize with the dying Malone, whose hopes, dreams and aspirations steadily evaporate before our eyes over the course of the novel.

“But I have felt so many strange things, so many baseless things assuredly, that they are perhaps better
left unsaid. To speak for example of the times when I go liquid and become like mud, what good would that do? Or of the others when I would be lost in the eye of a needle, I am so hard and contracted? No, those are well-meaning squirms that get me nowhere.”

Disclosure alert! Malone is going to die.

A cacophonic older man lies in his bed. Ultimate terrestrial residence, a room and its window, by which it watches the life, or what takes the place of it, to pass. Extension of his prehensile limbs, a staff with which he obviates his defunct mobility—some forgotten or unknown objects as the last witnesses of his stay on earth. While waiting to pay his passage to Charron the notcher, he fills a notebook with a final and pitiful attempt to prolong his post-mortem days by narrating a fable full of sound and fury, which means nothing, like, as William would say, that bloody prankster.
With Malone Dies continues Beckett's famous trilogy. However, if this opus gains clarity compared to the disconcerting Molloy, to which it refers by narrative motifs, it is not confident that it is more interesting. The reader finishes the second part of the triptych, still doubtful, acknowledging that it is not without value, that something is going on, that it would be hard to define.

“And if I were to stand up again, from which God preserve me, I fancy I would fill a considerable part of the universe, oh not more than lying down, but more noticeably. For it is a thing I have often noticed, the best way to pass unnoticed is to lie down flat and not move.

It must be a rather lonely business, dying, not the sudden death but the slow death of diseased or old age – If you die suddenly, it is something that occurs to you and you don’t have to deal with it, because before you know it you will be, you know, dead. But where you do know you are going to die in a while, are bed-ridden and can’t do anything – it almost becomes an act, you have to prepare yourself for it, the time goes slowly and there is not much to pass through it - you might have to create methods to pass time or your thoughts would give you hell before you die ... and that is why the book title uses death not as something that happens but something that one does – Malone dies.

And so Malone, an old man bed-ridden to his death-bed waits for his death. Like so many in his position, he has no one to talk to as fatally ill people often find themselves in far little society. Malone starts paying too much attention to trivils rather than turning indifferent to life as one could expect someone in his position. He is obsessed about his few possessions - stationary, stick, bed etc.

This waiting and preparing for death must make a person rather lonely - whether or not one has people around, caring for one, because only dying person knows the kind of suffering he/she is going through - with all the troubling memories, constant humiliating awareness of simple things (walking, talking etc.) one can no longer do and idea of death itself, the finality of it with all the anxieties, anguish, desperation and other-sad-feelings- with-fancy-names it might excite. Since most people won't be interested if he wishes to ramble on these subjects, there is not even illusion of company. And anyway, in suffering we are always alone – even if we are with people suffering from same thing.

And so, how does Malone deals with all this? He is clever, he knows he must keep himself occupied and so he decides to tell himself stories – not make stories but tell them in his mind to himself, with proper descriptions and all. Are those stories somehow related to his life? Probably, is there ever a story that doesn’t tell something about its narrator? Since we are in his consciousness, we get to see his story-telling being disturbed by his memories, his reactions to things happening around him etc. His stories remain unfinished but that is irrelevant – after all, those who read a lot, watch a lot of tv or just like imagining things, know that stories are told not to get to their end but to pass time in the eternal-seeming wait called life.

“And if I ever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be said, even though all has not been said, even though nothing has been said.”

Samuel Beckett's classic tale of a man on his death bed is darkly humorous at the same time as being tragic.

Attempting his last shot at writing tales, poor Malone tries his best not to get jumbled with his thoughts but instead ends up on various tangents and rents about previous grudges.

The dramatic pauses are brilliant, usually entailing the storyteller dropping his pencil and general confusion of his mind. The reader does a fantastic job at this.