i see where he's coming from but beckett is just boring. yes he's imaginative and interesting and he was the first to write the way he did of his time but reading and watching these plays now, i personally don't think they're canon.

i appreciate the plays and i have studied them enough to understand he is good at the way he writes to prove a certain point or hint at a theme or moral, but from my perspective it's just boring.

1 star. read and studied for uni but i didn't love it.

Bio sam tako blizu da odustanem negde na pola, kada me je Beket triput uzastopce nokautirao sa maltene reprizom prva dva dela, ali na kraju mogu reći da je vredelo. Bez dileme najčudnije komponovan roman u trilogiji, koji potpuno odbacuje ideju o paragrafu nakon dvadesetak stranica, ali i ideju o tački nakon stotinu i dvadesetak. Na trenutke je stvarno težak za čitanje, ali onda, po sada već običaju za trilogiju, Beket maestralno zatvori krug i sve privede kraju na potpuno zapanjujuć način. Nešto što se možda najbolje da opisati kao poezija u prozi, gde nije važno značenje rečenica već rečenica sama, njena melodija i simetrija, njena lepota. Ali isto tako ovo je i jedan od onih romana kojima mogu da se divim, ali ne i da ih stvarno volim. Veličina, ipak, poseduje neku izvesnu hladnoću genijalnosti. A Beket bogme jeste to na slovo ’g’.

4

This was an interesting read (listen) I gave up on trying to understand exactly what was going on, and just listened to it and experienced it without a full grasp of what I was listening to.

Maledetto sia il giorno in cui notai che per soli tre euro in più potevo avere non solo Aspettando Godot, ma anche alcune altre opere di Samuel Beckett.
È da cinque mesi che ho questo commento in testa, ma mi sono detto: "Vai avanti, non lasciar perdere, sicuramente ci sarà qualcosa di buono e gli darai almeno tre stelline". Invece no.
La triste verità è che i lavori di Beckett hanno senso solo se contestualizzati. Specie gli ultimi della raccolta. Se i primi (Aspettando Godot, Finale di partita, Tutti quelli che cadono) hanno qualcosa in sé di concreto a cui il lettore può aggrapparsi (dialoghi, ambientazioni, personaggi), gli altri sono parole a caso, giochi di luce, monologhi infiniti, gesti ripetitivi, pause. Insomma: nulla.
Sicuramente fa più effetto a teatro. A fine lettura, a parte un lontanissimo "che bello" per Aspettando Godot, non resta che la sensazione di essersi tolti un grande peso; con tutto che le ultime cento pagine le ho lette di corsa, senza soffermarmi su eventuali sottotesti (ma non ce ne saranno, e se ci fossero sarebbero nell'insieme, non nelle singole parti del dialogo), per il puro gusto di arrivare alla fine.

Excellent ending to the trilogy. A meditation on creativity and an endless improvisation hovering above the abyss that takes on a comforting hue.

The Unnamable is about freedom. It's pretty easily the freest text Samuel Beckett ever wrote. All of the novels preceding it were infected with literature, Joyce, traditions of Irish humor, etc, to some extent, even as they strained--quite successfully at times--to break free of these fetters. Writing in French was an important step, freeing the authorial voice from much of its learned shackles of English literary style, enabling the voice to more freely and simply say what the voice wanted to say, what the voice wasn't sure it could say, and its troubling to wonder how to say both what it had to and could not say. More than any other text I've ever encountered, The Unnamable comes the closest to F. T. Marinetti's Futurist ideal of words-in-freedom. The voice speaks, unfettered by literature, about how a literary text could possibly come into being and, if it were to come into being, what could it possibly say?

This voice is so free it could never conform to the constraints of the form, could not possibly construct a novel. And yet, by bringing into question all that a novel might be, it does. The novel, if written, could have no title. Therefore it is entitled "the unnamable," a name that means that it cannot be named. The voice explores many options in its search for silence, which happens through speaking. Its I and its he are incessantly self-questioned, previous Beckett characters invoked and discarded, as the voice describes first a Mahood and then a new character, Worm, who again, being a he, isn't quite and yet can only be a part of this I that cannot speak but must speak of how it cannot speak--in order to arrive at no longer speaking.

This raw, un-moored narrative voice searches for a place, a setting, that cannot be invoked because the narrative voice is neither here nor there. All the time it worries about them, what they would have it say, what they have taught it, what they want. They are really us, I believe, the audience before the fact, the nonexistent army of readers pre-imagined in the wholly non-publishable book. We/they are a nasty, demanding lot. We probably think this book is about us, we're so vain. But of course it is--to whom else would the narrative voice speak? We, too, are there in the non-place, following the words that cannot tell a story, that tell the story of not being able to tell the story, that speak toward silence, that cannot go on, but do, and must, go on.

And Beckett did go on. And, though I love many of his later texts, perhaps even more than this one, never again did he let the voice roam quite this freely. Savor this exalted moment, maybe the freest in the whole of our literature.

Okay. I get it. Or I don't. Mahood made me say it. Or I made him say it I'm not lying. He's lying to both of us. I miss Malone and Molloy. Plus, we are floating. I will go on.

This was incredible but too hard to fully grasp with one reading. It took me 60 years to build up the courage to read it the first time, I might need a year or two before picking it up again.

Wow whatever it was, it hit me hard.

I'll admit, this is more of a 3.5 stars kind of book, seeing as there's a lot of content, and it varies quite a bit between the obviously genius ('Godot', 'Endgame', 'All That Fall') and the somewhat lacklustre ('Roughs for Theatre', 'Ghost Trio'). The full-length stage plays are great, the radio plays are stellar - and, usually, much easier to read - and the rest is pretty mixed, especially the film scripts and the works that are essentially a set of instructions.. There are some pieces which go on for five or six pages and don't feel like they have much to them other than the beginnings of an idea, and then there are others that come in at under four pages but feel totally whole. All in all, like any writer, Beckett's total body of work is of varying quality, but most of it's worth reading, and the dross makes the diamonds shine even brighter.