The first of the trilogy of short novels Beckett wrote around the same time as Waiting for Godot. It is hugely comical and though Beckett has a reputation for glumness, I can’t see why he isn’t regarded more in this light. In fact the attitude of glumness is in itself parodied in its main character’s constant moaning and then naïveté. Molloy and later the researcher sent after him both go on odysseys of sorts but they are journeys of delay, repetition and paralysis. The reader is continually frustrated and delighted by a shaggy dog story that won’t just get on - see Lawrence Sterne and Tristram Shandy for a useful precursor. But the prose is scintillating with constant wit and turns of phrase. The humour is bawdy and human. And everyone now and then a moment of beauty will bowl you over. It might knock you into a ditch where you will find yourself with every other Beckett character but despite their ailments and complaints they do make excellent company.

Fabulous and yet. And yet. It had changed so much since I last read it--nearly 30 years ago, in college. My first Beckett, I believe. Of course the sucking stones. The systems. The incessant rhetorical backtracking, saying and then re-saying, unsaying, noting that saying is saying, that it could be said differently, better, but that it wasn't and will never be. That it is what it is. This was all quite familiar, held in the memory of the words themselves and how they proceeded from one to the next.

I had altogether forgotten, however, the novel's second half, its other narrator, and disjointed joining of the two voices and their similar yet different logorrhoea--Moran. Now I'm not sure what to make of the two segments and their tenuous unmet companionship, the hunter and the hunted, so similar, so different. Their knees similarly dysfunctional, their attitudes so oddly opposed--he who knows nothing and fills pages with what he remembers not remembering alone in a room and he who writes, alone in his room, a report of his failure to complete his mission to find the elusive wandering speaker of the previous section. Of course both are writers and authorship and knees therefore pull them together even as (spoiler) they remain forever apart. Of course Beckett's other characters become mentions of Moran's previous missions--ha ha. Chinese boxes: narrators within fictional narrators within fictions of fictional narrators... But what does Moran/Beckett do when he finds/invents these characters? Again, even he can't remember. Because Beckett's characters are so free--of property, duty, profession, and even society at large--there is almost nothing they can do. "Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to do." True. All we have, in our world, is the drudgery we do in order to stay alive. Like writing. Looking. Seeking. Secret-agenting. Does anyone ever read our reports? It's a quite humorous kind of nihilism.

Reading this was like experiencing overlapping dreams that I can't quite remember. It was difficult. It was not difficult. What does it matter? I feel as though I've been pounding on a door to gain entrance to a house but it is only after I stop pounding that the door will open but I cannot stop.

confusing but good

There are no words to express how much I love this book.
There are too many words to express how much I love this book.
Time to move on to the next in the trilogy. Oh my god, this writing.

a critic once described 'waiting for godot' as 'a play in which nothing happens, twice', which would probably make this a novel in which nothing happens, twice, and possibly backwards. fortunately i really like novels where nothing happens so thought this was great, your mileage may vary.