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A review by christopherc
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
3.0
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.
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.