Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett is included on some of the most prestigious lists, including The Bokklubben World Library Best 100 Books of All Time, Le Monde’s Best 100 Novels, 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it is ranked 274th on the Greatest Books of All Time site, alas, it is not one of my Top 1,000 Favorites, not even if I go up to 5k I am afraid – you find reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other web pages on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett is included on some of the most prestigious lists, including The Bokklubben World Library Best 100 Books of All Time, Le Monde’s Best 100 Novels, 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it is ranked 274th on the Greatest Books of All Time site, alas, it is not one of my Top 1,000 Favorites, not even if I go up to 5k I am afraid – you find reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other web pages on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 


6 out of 10

 

I have enjoyed Waiting for Godot https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/04/waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett.html which is 94th on The Greatest Books of All time site, nevertheless, Malone Dies had to be more or less abandoned- this being an audiobook, it went on in my ear, but without much impact, especially in the second part

 

‘Isn’t it absurd to try to write a “common sense” note on an absurd piece of theater?’ I think I am quoting myself here, it is from a previous note on Beckett (I have more than four books of his under my belt, Waiting for Godot and his work on Proust have been admirable) but I am not sure if I thought about it, though I think I did

There were some good segments – more likely, all of them, seeing as this is one of The Best Books of All Time, only this is a personal note – and I will mention here the mule, the fact that this personage is looking at the animal, takes it from the slaughter house and then keeps the mule for about two years, he expected six months

 

On the other hand, I did not like Molloy https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/05/molloy-by-samuel-beckett.html and I find there are some of the same objections there, which I have for Malone Dies: “Is it true love in the rectum? He falls in love with “Ruth or maybe Edith” I thought Beckett must have been stuck in an “anal stage”, due to his frequent references to feces, turds, anus, defecation, etc.…which is here again

In Malone Dies, the narrator speaks of his sex, the tubular part, the sperm, and then…defecation, the ‘turds would reach Australia’, and yes, this is funny, even for me, but not overwhelming, just like in that scene from History of the World by Mel Brooks, where emperor Dom De Luise is presented with a massive treasure

 

He says ‘nice, not thrilling, but nice’, in a bored manner…some other passage which stunned me was the one with the rabbits and the incest in the air: both father and brother have these notions, ideas, I am not sure what they were, about the sister – the joke her would be that the father does not think of ‘his sister…

It is outré, bizarre, and hard – most often impossible – for me to take it in, and mea culpa: it is my fault, I just admit here that I was unable to appreciate Beckett, for his Molloy and now Malone Dies, although his Proust https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/proust-by-samuel-beckett.html was something of a revelation

 

Quotes form that work :“Proust places friendship somewhere between boredom and tiredness…he does not agree with Nietzsche who thinks friendship must be based on intellectual sympathy…Proust does not see in friendship the slightest intellectual significance” Another observation which escaped me, when reading Proust is that Proust makes description using vegetal comparisons and never animal: he did not get along with cats or dogs…The Baron de Charlus is well described by Beckett, as a combination of Lear, Oedipus and Archangel Rafael.

Rather shocking is the assertion that Proust was “in a way positivist” I thought that Proust was famous for the contrary attitude, even read a lecture on positive psychology from Harvard, saying that if Proust were positive, he would have been even more prolific, even more creative…

For those who declare themselves tired by Proust’s long phrases and style, Beckett replies that these are peaks and they can be tired, but never worse off.

 


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