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A review by christopherc
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
4.0
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.
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.