Here it is, folks, the last of Sam Beckett's Three Novels collection, The Unnameable. You may remeber my criticisms of the first two, Molloy and Malone Dies- I thought they were far too vague plot-wise and really just to difficult to make any sense of. Well guess what, The Unnameable makes those two look like Dan Brown novels as Beckett has now moved in my mind from "Not for me" to "Oh Jesus get it away from me." My first and easiest criticism is that there is zero plot whatsoever. I mean, you might hear someone say about some book "It was so boring! It's just a guy walking and thinking about his life!" or "That was a chore- nothing but dialog the whole time- where's the action?" But I have never read a book more deserving of the "no plot" criticism than the Unnameable. While at the start of the book it appeared that the unnamed protagonist may be an elderly man on his deathbed like Molloy and Malone, the plot spirals off into God-only-knows rambling where not only is the narrator unreliable to you, but to himself as well. He seems unsure about what the hell anything is, goes off on Descartes-ian tangents, may or may not take classes from a man named Basil who inexplicably has his name changed to Mahood, and then the last 50 pages was unintelligible. I admit at this point I started skimming more than reading, but I also got the impression at different points that the narrator was a meteor, or maybe a fish. Yep. Brief mentions of Molloy and Malone had me thinking that maybe Unnameable would make some sense of the previous two novels, but it just never did. I've read that this novel was an important work of existentialism, but something doesn't have to be unreadable to be existentialist- see Camus' The Stranger, which was actually pretty good. Well, at least reading The Unnameable has given me a greater appreciation for Beckett's previous works- in retrospect, Molloy feels like a pleasure read. There are still some more books I bought to challenge myself left though- Naked Lunch and Ulysses will get their entries soon enough. March 1, 2010
The Unnameable
Here it is, folks, the last of Sam Beckett's Three Novels collection, The Unnameable. You may remeber my criticisms of the first two, Molloy and Malone Dies- I thought they were far too vague plot-wise and really just to difficult to make any sense of. Well guess what, The Unnameable makes those two look like Dan Brown novels as Beckett has now moved in my mind from "Not for me" to "Oh Jesus get it away from me." My first and easiest criticism is that there is zero plot whatsoever. I mean, you might hear someone say about some book "It was so boring! It's just a guy walking and thinking about his life!" or "That was a chore- nothing but dialog the whole time- where's the action?" But I have never read a book more deserving of the "no plot" criticism than the Unnameable. While at the start of the book it appeared that the unnamed protagonist may be an elderly man on his deathbed like Molloy and Malone, the plot spirals off into God-only-knows rambling where not only is the narrator unreliable to you, but to himself as well. He seems unsure about what the hell anything is, goes off on Descartes-ian tangents, may or may not take classes from a man named Basil who inexplicably has his name changed to Mahood, and then the last 50 pages was unintelligible. I admit at this point I started skimming more than reading, but I also got the impression at different points that the narrator was a meteor, or maybe a fish. Yep. Brief mentions of Molloy and Malone had me thinking that maybe Unnameable would make some sense of the previous two novels, but it just never did. I've read that this novel was an important work of existentialism, but something doesn't have to be unreadable to be existentialist- see Camus' The Stranger, which was actually pretty good. Well, at least reading The Unnameable has given me a greater appreciation for Beckett's previous works- in retrospect, Molloy feels like a pleasure read. There are still some more books I bought to challenge myself left though- Naked Lunch and Ulysses will get their entries soon enough. 
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