Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable, by Samuel Beckett

One of the recurring threads in Charlie Kaufaman’s Antkind is mid-20th century comedy duos, like Abbott and Castello. Kaufman’s version are Mudd and Molloy, with a nod to Samuel Beckett, whose trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable, I read next. Kaufman even name drops Beckett’s novel in one chapter of Antkind when the film critic recovers in a hospital room. Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot are often interpreted as a comedy duo. Beckett sometimes displays a similar kind of low-brow, slapstick humor. But Beckett’s novels are the opposite of Kaufman’s. Beckett is a minimalist. His trilogy strips away where Kaufman piles on. Kaufman spins out, unbounded. Beckett pares down until nearly nothing is left, no character, no story, barely even a setting, just the author’s voice searching for a reason to write and wondering whether there’s any difference between the literary characters he invents and their stories, and the invention of his own “self” and the “story” he lives.

Molloy is in two sections. In the first a man, Molloy, recalls the story of journeying home to see his mother. In the second section a man named Moran is given an assignment to track down Molloy. Neither journey comes to a conclusion. In Malone Dies, Malone lies in a bed in a room that might be a hospital and spins stories while he waits to die. In The Unnameable, an unnamed man gives a stream-of consciousness monologue which after a few pages of standard paragraphs becomes over 100 pages with no break. It’s a tough read. But it’s no joke. I love modernist fiction but I prefer the maximalism of Joyce (Proust, Wallace, Kaufman). I’m not personally attracted to Beckett’s nihilism, but there’s something there. The trilogy has been on my list of novels I need to read someday for a long time. I’m glad I finally did