It’s difficult to know what to say about Samuel Beckett’s fiction. Bizarrely – and counter-intuitively – the obvious choices might tend toward the trite: “it’s hard”, “it’s rubbish”, “I didn’t understand a word”, “utterly profound” etc.
You may know where you stand on this spectrum.
And Malone Dies is no easier or harder than anything else of his. Personally, at times I struggled with the almost stream-of-consciousness prose delivered within the traditional confines of punctuation. The two didn’t seem to go well together. And at times, I confess I too swung wildly on the brilliance-rubbish continuum.
But what I think I was left with most of all was a sense of the inadequacy of language; it was almost as if, no matter how hard he tried, Beckett couldn’t quite bend it to his will… And maybe that was part of his point.
Oh, and awe too, of course. Anyone who can write Malone Dies and Waiting for Godot… Actually, anyone who can write Waiting for Godot…
Ian Gouge - Writer 