I thought a lot while I was reading this. I thought about birth and death, the body and ageing, fathers and sons, mothers and nature, duty and freedom. I believe that a book that makes me think is a great book. Full stop.

Some interesting quotes:
pinpointing one of the interesting dilemmas about writing autobiography: "...that must again be unknown to me which is no longer so and that again fondly believed, which then I fondly believed, at my setting out. And if I occasionally break this rule, it is only over details of little importance. And in the main I observe it. And with such zeal that I am far more he who finds than he who tells what he has found, now as then, most of the time I do not exaggerate."
on women: "Question, Have women a soul? Answer, Yes. Question, Why? Answer, In order that they may be damned."
on time: "But from time to time. From time to time. What tenderness in these little words, what savagery."
on death: "For death is a condition I have never been able to conceive to my satisfaction and which therefore cannot go down in the ledger of weal and woe. (...) Yes, the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered, believe it or not, if it wasn't a state of being worse than life. So I found it natural not to rush into it and, when I forgot myself to the point of trying, to stop in time. It's my only excuse."

This was a remarquable reading experience. I read this when I was 16, in Dutch, and immediately was swept away by the powerful imaginative language. More then 30 years later, after devouring Joyce and Proust, I started a reread of this book, but found it almost disappointingly indigestible: there are very little points of reference in this monologue by a crippled man, wrestling with the world and himself, craving for his mother. Yes, undoubtedly this novel contains flashes of genius, but I'm afraid too little of them to sustain the story and make it an overall success. (rating 2.5 stars)

Weird and entertaining

Molloy is a 1956 novel by Samuel Beckett often seen as the first volume in a trilogy with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, all three books being rambling first-person monologues that express the author's view of life as absurd (and best known to the general public from the play Waiting for Godot of the same period).

The first half of Molloy is narrated by the eponymous male figure, making his way through a vaguely Irish landscape to meet his ailing mother and ask for money. His shabby clothing, his run-ins with the local constabulary and his ill health suggest he is a bum. On the other hand, once you get into the narrative, his foibles could be those that we all deal with, and rather than being a literal transient, he could be anyone, just amusingly depicted.

The second half of the book is initially very different. The narrator changes to one Jacques Moran, a detective hired to track down Molloy. Moran is a religious man wracked with shame, and he has a tumultuous relationship with his teenage son. Eerie parallels with the first half of the book, however, suggest another possibility, namely that Molloy and Moran are the same person or two facets of one personality.

Beckett's writing is strongly longwinded, but the rambling dialogue ultimately comes to naught, as any statement that the narrator makes is very soon reversed: "The dog was uniformly yellow, a mongrel I suppose, or a pedigree, I can never tell the difference." "The house where Lousse lived was not far away. Oh it was not nearby either."

As one whose only prior experience with Beckett was Waiting for Godot, I was surprised by the extensive use of scatological humour here: in one scene Moran applies an enema to his son, and there are many other references to excretion. This crude view of human existence, the emphasis on the material nature of our bodies and the lack of any transcendent salvation, emphasizes Beckett's absurdist outlook.

In principle, I really dig what Beckett is doing in Molloy, but for me it eventually goes on for far too long. Of course, descending into an exasperating cock and bull story is entirely in line with Beckett's absurdist views, and other readers may have more endurance for the span of his storytelling than I did.

There is one sentiment in which I deeply sympathized with Moran: "All is tedious, in this relation that is forced upon me." Reading this novel, I felt the same.
Yet I did light upon some humorous or interesting bits. One of which is the following: "But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature."