Book description
'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his
deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian
Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory,
shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness,
without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of wilder rages than
Molloy. The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the
barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the
hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of
stone-cutters before them. it came down to me where I lay, in the
house in the plain, wild and soft, at the limit of earshot, soon
weary. The dogs of the valley replied with their gross bay all fangs
and jaws and foam...
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at
Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated
in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and
followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote
one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't
published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett
international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in
the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1961. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the
theatre until his death in 1989.
