Samuel Beckett in 2019

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the kind of writing that I wanted to do in 2019.  I was also thinking about the kind of reading that I wanted to do.  Without getting too deep into, I had decided that I wanted to do more of both of these things.  I thought that trying to write something about each book that I read would give me some direction in the year.  My writing tends to get a little scattered when I don't have anything specific going on and I haven't had anything specific going on for a while now.

When I set out on this plan, I was in the middle of a few different books (I still am in the middle of most of them), one of these being Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies.  

This novel is the second in a trilogy, also containing Molloy and The Unnamable, and I have all three collected in one book that I bought so long ago I can't place where or when.  

The book itself is a hard go.  In this novel and in Molloy, Beckett compresses and blends ideas.  He does not use conventional paragraph breaks or other narrative cues to denote shifts in focalization or even from exposition to dialogue to inner-monologue.  This technique helps to undercut the actual narrative so that the story itself is flattened; even the unusual events that the characters embark on become unremarkable and nearly indistinguishable from everyday life.  The characters, like those in much of his drama, seem to lose track of what they are doing and seem immune to emotional response.  The result is not so much boredom, or even ennui, but resignation.  

The effect that this all has, on me at least, is resignation.  I cannot name more than a few plot points because they are flooded with mundane details.  There are poetic and beautiful moments, but they are beaten down.  The two novels that I read are almost a study in entropy: while there are spikes in action and affect, the valleys of the ordinary are so flat and so long that the spikes are averaged out to almost nothing.

I knew when I set out to read this that it wouldn't necessarily be an enjoyable set of novels to read.  I may eventually return to complete the trilogy, but as of now I am going to leave The Unnamable for another time.