Novels of Samuel Beckett: Volume I

by Samuel Beckett, Colm Tóibín (Introduction), Paul Auster (Editor)

Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.

Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime. He loved the tension in 'cogito ergo sum' and took a dim view of the connecting word, the 'ergo' in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with whom they were trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am." — Colm Toibin, from his Introduction

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Ireland, Collections, 20th Century, France

496 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2006

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Mercier & Camier — to call it a same-sex love story is reductive, but that in part is what it is. Also, often hilarious.

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two years ago, 22nd February 2012, I bought a complete set of Samuel Beckett's works. It is composed of 4 hefty books that include all his novels, plays, poems and literary criticisms. I read it right away but got stalled so many times. Not that his works are not fully engaging but their meanings are not easy to grasp for probably somebody like me who is not a literature graduate in college. Beckett's books have now became a distraction whenever I wanted to be delighted with beautiful and intriguing prose even without understanding the plot, theme or message of the story.

Even if it took me almost 2 years to finish this first volume, I really enjoyed every minute that I leafed through it. Beckett is a class of his own. James Joyce is his influence but I would say that Beckett is more contemporary thus he is more engaging. Or maybe because I am reading the corrected version in this centenary edition of Grove Press. I have not sampled other edition of any of Beckett's works so I really don't know. All I can say that the way he wrote here was like reading any other literary works of existing (still alive) writers. It's just that reading Beckett does not always translate to comprehension (for me).

There are three novels in this first books: Murphy (5 stars for me) is about an aging man who plays pacifist chess. His story is strange because in the middle of it, he runs away from his betrothed, lives in with a prostitute and got employed working in a mental institution. His wordplay here is really a joy to read even if I am not good at playing chess; Watt (4 stars for me) is about a servant in an apartment and his relationship to his master and their tenants or other apartment dwellers (not sure really). The wordplay here is quite exaggerated (translation: overdone) but still delightful especially if you are having too much of Nicholas Sparks haha. This was were I got stalled so many times, it was just painful to be mesmerized very frequently that I could not leave some pages and my bookmark just stayed there each time I opened the book to read; and the last book here is a recent read Mercier and Camier (3 stars for me) that I only understood when I googled the title of the book prior to writing my review haha. One of my dear friends here on Goodreads, Barbara (I used to call her B until I thought she was a different person because she changed her profile pic and she is now sporting a nice girly haircut) admired my honesty and she said that probably Beckett did not know what his message should be or something to that effect. Thanks for the assurance, B. Awesome to have a friend like you.

On the the second volume. Beckett's famous trilogy: "Molloy", "Malone Dies" and "The Unnameable" awaits me. I just can wait, I will begin reading tonight.

For the meantime, off to work I go. Read Beckett, will you?

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I purchased the four-volume The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett Boxed Set in 2007, I went straight to the second volume, having read all of Beckett's plays and then The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 on the recommendation of my unreciprocated college crush, Katherine E. Ellison, who had also recommended to me the Trilogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). I didn't know much about these early books, which on glancing through, look startling conventional by comparison to the later books, although the principal characters are mentioned near the end of The Unnamable drawing all the books together (except the later How It Is , which came out in 1961). At the end of Mercier and Camier, Watt meets the title characters, and Mercier mentions having known Murphy. Watt makes a statement that seems to obliquely refer to The Unnamable, which was yet to be written in 1946 but probably would have been well known to most readers when the book was finally published in 1970. These three books all have a wit and charm and even the weirdness of the later books despite their more conventional form.

Murphy is the most amusing of the three books. It is told in third person about an eccentric and suicidal fellow trying to put together a respectable life and not doing a good job of it. He wants to marry his lover, Celia Kelly, but her grandfather, Willoughby, who is elderly and confined to a wheelchair, is proud of her that she is able to support herself through prostitution! That this is the 1930s is readily apparent, since a guy can walk into a hospital and get a job as a nurse without any special training. The world seems more open to possibilities then than it does now, if the story is at all realistic, which it probably isn't. Murphy is eventually successful in his suicide attempts, surviving one that is especially bloody but rescued by his landlady, but the book ends with the Kellys flying a kite in the park. The book has a comic tone throughout, lightening up its overall dark story. It's a shame that the most recent issue of this book has a green cover, since such a big deal is made that lemon yellow is Murphy's favorite color, and the previous edition of this book did, as well.

I had thought the cover of the collected volume was some sort of metaphor for Murphy, but it is a concrete, if upside down and backwards, representation of an abstract painting in Watt's room when he is moved to the second floor of the mansion in Watt , which is the most difficult of the three novels here. In many ways, it is a literary breakthrough in dealing with the minutiae of everyday thought, but it goes to far, often lapsing into tedious Shrödinger's cat lists of possibilities, such as what Watt's employer could wear on his feet at any given day, often unmatching. I recently wrote the Wikipedia article on catalogue arias, and these do seem like they could be good material for setting, but I don't think Beckett's estate would ever allow that as long as copyright laws protect it. It's a bit dry at times, which doesn't mean it's not often laugh-out-loud funny. The book is narrated in the first person minor by Sam, a servant in a neighboring house who rescues Watt from a hole in a barbed wire fence, who is probably meant to be Beckett himself, although as English majors we are taught never to assume such things. Watt narrated his story in pretty intense detail to Sam, since it reads like third person limited omniscient, and Sam barely appears in the book. I really messed up on adding the characters because there's a giant family I thought sure was only Watt's reverie that are pretty well shown to be real people by the end of the book. I am surprised man and dog aren't poisoned by the concoction Watt makes, however. Watt himself is a milk drinker, although often assumed to be a drunken derelict by those who see him, even though he is said by those who know him to never touch alcohol. I found it ironic, considering I'm still living in a homeless shelter, drink a lot of milk, and never drink alcohol. The book begins and ends with Watt coming and going to the house via foot and train, and incidents at the station. His arrival is strange, but he seems to be welcome, if not expected, and his departure seems random, as if he just decided he didn't want his job anymore. Weird detail about the length of the station master's arm is memorable for a totally gratuitous mention of the glans penis.

Mercier and Camier is probably the most accessible and Waiting for Godot -like of the three books, in that it focuses on two character rather than one, and has numerous exchanges that allowed me to complete it in less than four days of commutes. The last page notes that the English version is a fourth shorter than the French version (Beckett himself was the translator). So little happens in the title characters' journeys that lists of incidents after every two chapters are really quite helpful in recalling what happened. The book starts claiming it was witness by the unnamed narrator, possibly Sam again, but with nothing explicit, although, as mentioned, the two do meet Watt at the end. Inspector Francis Xavier Camier, short and stout, is best friends with Mr. Mercier, tall and bearded, who dislikes his wife, and the two are described as younger old men, I'm guessing late 50s-early 60s. The book was written in 1946 and the characters were around at the turn of the century. The opening of chapter four really reads like the two are a gay couple, although I wonder if I'm reading too much in. One of my graduate school colleagues said that when he showed Astaire and Rogers movies to his media students, they would assume that Fred Astaire and Edward Everett Horton's characters are gay, but this actually has them naked under bed covers at the house of a woman named Helen in whom neither seems to have any but platonic interest.

The two do have major encounters with police at three points in the book. The second is extremely brutal and unprovoked, and the cop's head at the end of the encounter is described as like part of a shell peeling off the egg, although the prose is such that one can't be sure if they invoked what in the United States would be Plummer v. State. They are never punished, which may have had something to do with its initial rejection, although sales of Murphy were the publisher's official reason for non-acceptances. The use of F and C words, and the graphic description of dog fornication at the beginning, make me wonder if Beckett ever submitted it to Viking, which published his mentor, James Joyce, whose use of F and C words in Ulysses resulted in a winning court case. Colm Toíbín's introduction has quite a bit of Beckett biography as well as details about his own court case dealing with obscenity. In spite of some of the vulgar language, it is hard to see any of these three novels as the least bit obscene by contemporary standards.

When Watt meets them at the end of the book, he's not very much in character, drinking three rounds of alcohol and smashing Camier's walking stick, which is an heirloom, causing Camier to reflect upon how little the two ever talk about each other, and probably leads to his separation from Mercier at the end of the book.

All three books made me laugh out loud at intentional humor, while also reading as both profound and spare. They seem like great books to be read aloud, even if you wouldn't want kids around. While Beckett's most serious devotees generally find Beckett's novels superior to his theatrical work, they do have a definite theatricality to them due to his very deliberate use of language, impacted by the fact that he had started writing in French and translating back into English because the English language is so much bigger and full of loan words, and felt that his writing was too poetic in English. It still seems to me poetic in English, and my knowledge of French makes me want to get an untranslated copy. Reading Beckett is like reading few other novelists' work, distinctive even in a less radical form than the subsequent four novels, and quite a different voice, I believe, from Joyce (although, as I write this, I have read only Finnegans Wake and a few stories from Dubliners , including "The Dead," although I have purchased the Norton A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man and expect to read it soon). I have now read all of Beckett's novels except the omitted Dream of Fair to Middling Women , which was published posthumously and not included in this collection, although the edition made available at the time of this edition had a cover that looked almost uniform with these editions, unfortunately no longer easily available.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The interesting aspect to this collection is seeing Beckett's writing before he found voice and gave up writing about anything, which is to say everything. Murphy is surprisingly straightforward story for Beckett. The exploration of what is a body and what is the mind is achingly too obvious. Although, Murphy contains one of the best opening sentences in all of literature: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Murphy finds Beckett trying to be too witty for his own good.

Watt is where Beckett finds himself in his prose. The ludicrous situations are built upon repetitions and echoes of these and repetitions never realized. Beckett reduces his thoughts to vulgarity of the immediate situation without grandstanding. Watt can be tedious in spots where situations are weighed in their varied permutations, despite being taxing at times to read through. These arrive at the main crux that Watt has: where does difference become a qualitative difference, not merely a quantitative one.

Camier and Mercier always struck me as a B-side to Beckett's oeuvre. It never reaches a cohesion at any point and feels miscellaneous. Even his later, extremely abstract plays, managed to make sense within their own confines; this is not the case here. It seems this may be the reason Beckett left it unpublished until 1970.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first I'd ever read of Beckett's fiction, having some familiarity with his stage and film works. Anyway, it comes to me at a time when I've been reading a lot about Modernism as an aesthetic movement so I was thinking a lot about Murphy, Watt, and Mercier and Camier as not only works on their own but trying to get at something angry and political with their absurdity. All three novels seem to take place in the same kind of mystic Irish Night Town of Ulysses or The Third Policeman where associations blur and everyone seems stranded in a twilight now. Beckett's now is stagnant and unchanging and his characters are mechanical and replaceable. In this collection, I think I enjoyed Watt most of all as something that fits with my own tastes, but your mileage may vary. I think I'm fond of the way that book in particular points to all the limits of knowledge and the sort of mania that can come about from producing educated guesses to fill those limits which continually fail to match the actual absurdity at work. Each of Beckett's characters is stranded outside of his own community in some way and struggles to be seen or understood, but what comes out is garbled nonsense. Oh well.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

very hard read. intellectual vocabulary is just the first obstacle with Beckett. reading with notes is recommended. i love the literature - MUCH different from the NY Times best sellers.

[Thirthankar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful edition of one of the most thought provoking authors of the last century. Must have for Samuel Beckett fans.