Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Re: the 'currently reading' bit of the previous blogette: Molloy, Malone Dies & the Unnamable are three novels by Samuel Beckett often grouped together as a trilogy (though not by the writer himself!), and no, they're not just for posers and people who can't make friends.
I'm part way through the last, The Unnamable, looking forward to the last sentence (because it's about 20 pages long, not just because it's the last sentence!). The novel is a worm-holing roller coaster through the mind of......who or what, you know not, but a mind racked in howling protest at the eternal avalanche of language into which it is tipped and by which it is trapped, and by means of which it is forced to be.

This jolly little chap from Bacon's Three Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion gets the overall mood just about right:

Having said all that, I love this from the same book:

'But let us first suppose, in order to get on a little, then we'll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further, that it is in fact required of me that I say something, something that is not to be found in all I have said up to now'.

Now that is a nice little basis for going forward in any given circumstance. Our lives viewed as a series of suppositions. We must presuppose certain things in order to proceed on our way. If we did not, we would never move, choosing instead to test the evidence and reliability of our senses. By a series of such suppositions we proceed on our way. The supposition, in this instance, is that it is incumbent upon the speaker to to say something new. A fresh supposition will carry us bobbing along the stream of language a little further still.

An unexpectedly humane, almost homely view of life.

The other thing is - much to my surprise - I found myself laughing out loud at points in all three books. There are really funny bits. I don't mean 'deliciously amusing' bits like some toffs claim to find bits of Mozart operas, I mean very-funny-so-you-laugh-out-loud bits. Fantastic.

And the other, other thing is that Beckett has a cubist-like ability to emotionally fracture a narrative flow, so that you can be shatteringly wrenched from the admittedly weird sense of normality into which Beckett has drawn you, into a breathtakingly sudden encounter with the terrifyingly un-hinged. And back again.

Just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say.

Samuel Beckett to Francis Bacon in one move: eaaaasy!
Samuel Beckett to Tommy Cooper in one move:..........uurrmmm.....give me time, give me time. I'm working on it............

Molloy, Malone & the Unnamable. Three books by Samuel Beckett. Read them now or else we'll tell our mums to hide in your wardrobes.