Well, having already read Waiting for Godot, I was expecting my dive into more of Beckett's writing to be a little depressing, but I wasn't expecting it to be so disappointing. Godot is fantastic and really draws that old feeling of existential angst to the forefront and never lets go. Endgame was decent, but placed so closely to Godot in this collection and having its emotional centre in such a similar vein, it just felt like maybe a little too much of the same. Happy Days was a standout and a great little story. The rest of this collection is uneven at best, and I get that Beckett was experimenting in extreme minimalism in his later years, but man, it really wasn't for me and there were some passages I found to be downright unreadable. To sum up, strong start, vomitous finish.

I think my brain is too smooth for absurdism

This was a play I was supposed to read in my first year of uni and honesty I can't remember if I read it and chose to forget that memory, or never bothered. Either way, when I came to read it now it just wasn't for me. I like some modernist stuff but this one was just a bit too despair-filled.

Endgame is a play with four characters: Hamm and Clov are more central, but we also have Nagg and Nell, Hamm's parents who each live in a bin. The four are living in what seems to be a perhaps post-apocalyptic world. They are approaching death and the main focus of the play is the pointlessness of human existence.

This was an interesting play to read, and definitely worth a quick read if you're looking to read more plays or more modernist works. I can see why it's acclaimed as an important piece of literature, but it just wasn't for me. It's a play filled with despair and decay and utter hopelessness. There's not really much more I can say about it (and no real plot or twists to spoiler) - it's full of very specific conversations between the characters that reflect on a much broader scope of life. I gave this two stars because it kept be interested but I can't say that I enjoyed it at all (though you're not really supposed to I guess!).

3.5 stars

very confused but i felt alot of things so...

3.5 stars

excellent mais tellement pas digeste !

Read.
Then read again.
And again.
And again.

بعضی مواقع خوندن یه کتاب با ترجمه بد مساوی هست با نخوندش.
و تقریبا هیچی از نمایشنامه می تونم بگم متوجه نشدم.
بعضی جاها از روی ترجمه انقدر که بی معنی بود می‌شد حدس زد نویسنده به انگلیسی از چه اصطلاحی استفاده کرده.

Yeah, nope. Too heady for me. I can take a lot of weird choices in a book, but this one was just too much for my brain to handle. I understand and appreciate what Beckett was doing here, but that doesn't mean I have to like it, right?