Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett - Book Review

  When I was in elementary school, I read a book called 'Loser' by Jerry Spinelli. It was about a boy about the same age as I was, named Zinkoff (his last name), and he basically was a klutz, couldn't do anything right, and other kids made fun of him. But one defining night, he finds out that Claudia, who I think was his neighbour's daughter?, went missing in the winter dark. Zinkoff goes to find her all alone, amid the police sirens wailing,which he assumes are part of a search party for Claudia. Though it turns out that she had already been rescued hours ago, and that the search party was for him; a real klutz through and through. But the book ends with him being able to size up a bully during recess, and actually winning his respect, or something like that. It's a good old heartwarming story of how even a 'loser' can be a hero in his own sense.

Interestingly and yet probably understandably, I kept thinking about this book when I was reading the Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. There were some tangible similarities for sure, the most obvious one for me being the part about sucking stones. Molloy goes into excruciating (mostly unnecessary?) detail about them; Zinkoff sucks on them as an attempt to retain body heat in his mouth while he continues his escapade in the snow. The way Zinkoff kept walking in the snow, unable to really see where he was going, getting lost in his thoughts at the same time, was also Molloy-esque.

But I think this contrast with 'Loser' is interesting, because it paints for me a bigger picture of what I used to expect from stories, literature, books. The first time I came in contact with the Three Novels was probably about 4 years ago, when I was still in my big David Foster Wallace phase, where I was looking at books as a way to validate my own feelings that something was not right with my life, something I couldn't quite put a finger on. Because of that, I think I was drawn to books that seemed like they knew where I was coming from, and wanted to offer some sort of answer. So I think back then those would be authors like Musil (with his almost sarcastic tone, revealing contradictions about modern life left and right), Pessoa (about his solitude, and his pain surrounding it, but also this necessity/inevitability he felt about it, which I think I found myself wanting to relate to a lot after college, mm edgy...), and Edouard Leve (with how straightforward he was about trying to describe himself, and what drives people to kill themselves). Also got into Proust a bit too, probably really just trying to relate to how sensitive he was. But the point is that I wanted certain things from these books, mostly to tell me how I should live my life, how I should think about all this pain I felt I was carrying around. How I could find my Claudia, and to find some unbudging inner me that could be quietly confident, like Zinkoff became. And that's what I also looked for in Beckett's work as well.

So from this perspective, the Three Novels almost seemed pretty repetitive. I mean it almost starts just like how 'In Search of Lost Time' starts, with these (literally) dreamy passages that blur reality, and I felt like it was the same mopey tone that Pessoa was writing in, which felt counterproductive and downright depressing. So within the first few pages I felt like I would have nothing new to gain from the book, and gave up.

Fast forward 4 years, and this time I rediscovered Beckett's works from a completely different perspective; actually from that of poetry. I think I really started to find joy in reading again, from the new angle of enjoying language itself, the imagery that somehow I feel responsible for creating when I'm visually translating all these words into meaning. And the poetry I had enjoyed the most then was John Ashbery, who was part of the New York School of poets notably with Frank O'Hara. I really liked 'Lunch Poems', and in it I think he mentioned Beckett quite a few times. And so that piqued my interest in him again, this time as more a master of language than anything; being bestowed meanings of life or important lessons could take a back seat.

From this perspective, I felt like I could fully enjoy Beckett. The way the stories are never linearly told, almost like the details of the plot were never a means to an end. There's this feeling that Beckett is always trying to do something with the story, in order to reveal something deeper about the fabric of stories, of lives, probably of time and space itself. One of the more obvious examples of Beckett doing this would be this section, when Malone is trying to write a story about Sapo and, what I think is Mrs. Lambert and her daughter who came to visit? (It's hard to tell...) But even as Beckett writes about Malone, who himself is writing a story about Sapo, the focus on something like that's almost like the "backdrop of reality", is noticeable:

It was summer. The room was dark in spite of the door and window open on the great outer light. Through these narrow openings, far apart, the light poured, lit up a little space, then died, undiffused. It had no steadfastness, no assurance of lasting as long as day lasted. But it entered at every moment, renewed from without, entered and died at every moment, devoured by the dark. And at the least abatement of the inflow the room grew darker and darker until nothing in it was visible anymore. For the dark had triumphed. And Sapo, his face turned towards an earth so resplendent that it hurt his eyes, felt at his back and all about him the unconquerable dark, and it licked the light on his face. Sometimes abruptly he turned to face it, letting it envelop and pervade him with a kind of relief. Then he heard more clearly the sounds of those at work, the daughter calling to her goats, the father cursing his mule. But silence was in the heart of the dark, the silence of dust and the things that would never stir, if left alone. And the ticking of the invisible alarm-clock was as the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last.

This theme regarding the border between light and dark, between life and death, is repeated quite a few times in Malone Dies, including in the really memorable one-liner: `And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another`. It wasn't portrayed in the stories of the Three Novels, as much as it was perpetuated by the styles in which they were told; in the sections in Malone Dies that I just talked about, but also the way Beckett seems to hold a magnifying glass and zooms into the gritty parts of the stories sometimes, just to reveal that maybe they don't even matter, as seen in this also-very-famous quote from Molloy:

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

The last novel of the trilogy, The Unnameable, felt like it took this concept except it cranked up the intensity and abstractness of it all way, way higher. When reading it felt like the natural progression of where things were headed, but to me it felt kind of weak, almost like Beckett was so desperate to grasp onto the elusive string of Truth that he felt he had excavated, and had zoomed in so much to the atoms that he revealed that at that molecular level it's actually mostly air. Or at least that's the kind of disappointment and frankly boredom I felt reading it.

But I think my negative reaction towards The Unnameable makes it more clear for me why Molloy and Malone Dies worked for me: With Beckett guiding you through actual stories, no matter how superfluous they were supposed to be for him, it made it easier to feel that tangible feeling of, picking and peeling at the skin that makes up reality. For me those were the most vivid visual experiences I got from the books; feeling characters tell completely different stories, looking for different things, sometimes chasing each other, and yet ultimately devolving into the same person, same tone. People dying and disappearing and being memorable and sometimes just lying there. The meaningless details that bombard these pieces for large sections at a time, playing even more into the lack of character and plot development, which helps you focus on something that seems to matter more.

It's also important I think to mention how funny these novels are. The random spurts of crude dirty (shit and I think dick?) jokes felt Joycean. Was this in a reaction to how seriously literature was taken back then? I think that's what I read somewhere. When I first got into reading more distinguished authors like Beckett, I never really thought these things could actually be funny, but they are. One of the funnier Beckett lines I remember, not from the Three Novels but from his novella 'The End':

Now I was making my way through the garden. There was that strange light which follows a day of persistent rain, when the sun comes out and the sky clears too late to be of any use. The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.

So those are my quick thoughts about Malone Dies, along with the Three Novels.