Book review: Samuel Beckett

I acquired on my bookshelves two Samuel Beckett books, which I've just got around to reading.

I'll keep one, but the other I'll deposit in the local book exchange.

Based entirely on reading these two books, the big thing that jumps out at me is that Beckett is incredibly good at writing at length, and with great fluency, on nothing.  The way he focuses on the mundane and trivial, going around and about for multiple pages and yet getting nowhere, is impressive.

Sometimes it's amusing in a dry way, and it sort-of works in his play, Waiting for Godot.  There are enough witticisms in the short book to keep me turning the pages.

But it's also often incredibly boring.

In my opinion, Malone Dies doesn't have enough to keep the interest, and it was a painful read.  I felt compelled to complete it, and while the last 20 pages or so were better, overall for me it wasn't worth it.

I guess the works are supposed to have an existentialist point, in the sense that they focus on the characters' small everyday activities, blowing them up to high importance compared with an outside world which is seemingly incomprehensible.  The characters' persistence and narrow focus on their concerns is rhetorically exaggerated, showing at the same time their subjective importance to the characters but also the objective triviality and meaninglessness.  The characters' serious fight for the pointless is both pessimistic and blackly comedic.  That is, the works seem to have built into them the key existentialist thoughts of (a) existence before essence and (b) absurdity and rebellion with respect to the characters' intentions when compered to the world around them.  The one existentialist thing missing for me, though, was self-awareness.  As I understand it, existentialist authenticity is about recognising the human condition, but persisting anyway.  Beckett's characters persisted but showed no self-aware recognition; the awareness was at best only on the part of the writer and reader.

But as I see it, reading fiction is also about simple entertainment, and if stories don't have that then it's rare that philosophic points alone will make it worth it.

Waiting for Godot passes the keep-it test, in part because it's such a well-known classic and in part because there's enough thoughtful humour in the short work.  But for me Malone Dies is not worth keeping.