Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81384 in Books
• Published on: 1973-09-27
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 418 pages

Customer Reviews

The greatest realist novel ever written
The trilogy is a single novel, with around a dozen scenes; the titles are largely irrelevant. It is just as good a novel in French, but both are worth reading as they play subtle tunes off each other.

Beckett is essentially a realist novelist. Most of the places described really exist. Even the non-existent places are realistically depicted. Feel the ambience. Read it for the plot. The story is clear and morally uplifting. Even a little over-simplistic. "I can't go on.I'll go on."! Read How it is for the next episode. The trilogy leads on from Watt so there is a prequel.

It is now routine to describe Beckett as the greatest writer in English of the Twentieth Century. Pardon me, some of us have known this for a long time, and it isn't because of Godot that we think it. There is one caveat. Beckett succeeded in his writing so emphatically because he limited himself to a range of themes which he mastered totally. He didn't take too many risks. He is the greatest, but there were others who had greater courage, and a noble failure sometimes outweighs a gem-like triumph.

I make two further claims about Beckett and myself.

1. I may be the all-time champion for youngest reader of at least part of the trilogy. In 1958 when I was eleven I read about half on Malone Dies, before the terror hit me. I had borrowed it because I thought that it was a thriller. I never forgot it and I read the trilogy around four years later. Never looked back.

2. Purely by accident I have sat at the very table Beckett is sitting at in the picture on the front of this edition. I never knew this before today because my copy is the first edition, with a really nice abstract design on the cover.