Molloy
Review of the novel by Samuel Beckett
I first read this book 13 years ago. I forced myself to read it because of the author’s reputation, but I couldn’t make sense of it.
A friend recently told me that it’s one of her favorite books, so I forced myself to try again.
It reminded me a bit of The Life and Times of Michael K by Coetzee, in terms of physical disabilities and the desperate minimalist living conditions of the central character. But Coetzee seemed to be making statements about society and politics by graphically describing a horrendous, barely human way of life. Beckett’s dystopic world has nothing to do with society. He describes two people who are the source of their own misery.
There are some bizarre and memorable observations along the way.
“To restore silence is the role of objects.” p. 13
“… I was on my way to my mother, whose charity kept me dying.” p 22
“My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now of a joke that still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it gos on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.” p.36
The author is deliberately cryptic throughout, and ends,
“It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” p. 176
