The End: Samuel Beckett (Penguin Modern)

Interesting. Becketts prose work is so often a poor second to his plays that roar, like Whitman, through the pines of C20th theatre. The writing is dense, there isn't the stage or the performance to make sense of the wonderful rhythms and careful plotting of the language. the humour is too often difficult to get at.I struggled... until I remembered his wonderful gift for language and for the absurd.I became a mouth reader!Say them out loud, in a harsh whisper, paying careful attention to the punctuation and they come alive! What was bleak become blackly funny. What was repetitious becomes ritual. What was mundane become magical

3/5 • I’m not an authority on the work of Beckett although I have seen a handful of screen adaptations of his most notable plays and have been fascinated and entertained by them. THE END is the first of his prose works I’ve read. While it has his trademark bleakness and gallows humour it’s a little too morbid for my liking: a barrel of laughs this tiny book ain’t. It is darkly amusing in places but the overall tone is one of death and decay, which is clearly what Beckett intended. That’s fine, in this regard he achieved his aim, but because of this it left me feeling rather dank and miserable. There’s no denying the power of the man’s words but I’m not sure I could take 80,000 of them if they were all like this. However, the small amount offered here is just about bearable and is definitely worth experiencing.

Mabye I'm just not sharp enough to enjoy Beckett but I found alot of this rather difficult to follow. 'The End' (or its first half at least) was quite good but it all fell apart in a confusing mess for me by the time I reached the second story.

This is an interesting member of the Penguin Modern series of true pocket-sized books, containing two short writings by Samuel Beckett. Together they cover 55 small pages. These are lesser-known writings that those already familiar with Beckett may not have read. For those who have never read Beckett, this little book is a good introduction. These are sad existential tales, written as first person narratives, but I do not find them depressing and in places a little dark humour may be discerned. You get hints that the outside world may see the narrator in a different way to how he sees himself. They pose more questions than answers. The two stories are titled The End and The Calmative.THE END: “They clothed me and gave me money . . . In the days that followed I visited several lodgings, with not much success . . . Once on the road it was all downhill . . .”. In The End a man leaves an institution. For a while he finds a lodging. Then he lives in a cave by the sea. Then he lives in a shed in the mountains. Then, possibly, he dies.THE CALMATIVE: “I don’t know when I died . . . So I’ll tell myself a story . . . I am, this evening, older than my father ever was and older than I shall ever be . . . “. In The Calmative, a dead man tells himself stories of his past travels to calm himself and take his mind off his decaying body. Towards the end it says “. . . we are needless to say in a skull . . . “, which sounds less harsh and more elegant in the original French “. . . nous sommes bien entendu dans une tête . . .”. That is, we are in a story inside someone’s head.These two stories appear in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Samuel Beckett stories titled  First Love and Other Novellas

Very good. Thanks.

Good stuff

Good read

This was okay, but it was also kind of forgettable. I think part of that is my fault though, because I wasn’t really in the right headspace to read it. Still, I thought this was fine, just not “fun“.