Book description
These four stories or 'nouvelles' date from 1945, though all were
published much later, in French and subsequently in English. All make
use of a first-person narrator, and relish its vagaries - the
inability to remember facts, the uncertainty as to why he is speaking
in the first place, the loss of heart when explanations seem called
for... Above all, the stories crisply plot the narrator's plotless
descent into vagrancy, the steeper as it approaches The End. Out of
these short works and their patient procedures grew the large canvases
of Molloy and Malone Dies. My bench was still there. It was shaped to
fit the curves of the seated body. It stood beside a watering trough,
gift of a Mrs Maxwell to the city horses, according to the
inscription. During the short time I rested there, several horses took
advantage of the monument. The iron shoes approached and the jingle of
the harness. Then silence. That was the horse looking at me. Then the
noise of pebbles and mud that horses make when drinking. Then the
silence again. That was the horse looking at me again. Then the
pebbles again. Then the silence again. Till the horse had finished
drinking or the driver deemed it had drunk its fill. Edited by
Christopher Ricks
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.
