"The Expelled; The Calmative; The End & First Love" by Samuel Beckett

These four 'novels' (anyone else would call them short stories) relate the story of a man outside society, a drop out, perhaps a tramp. He has a little independence but he is handicapped by his fears so that he cannot cope with life. Thus, when he walks and pays attention to the way he is walking, he falls down. When he perseveres he has to fling himself to the ground to avoid crushing a child although normally he wouldn't bother because he hates children. Hats feature prominently.

He writes beautifully. There are beautiful descriptions and tantalising metaphors. The hero is a man of mystery about whom we want to know more; we want to understand what has brought him to this pass. But these are just glimpses through a window and we will never know more than we are told. And that, in the end, is unsatisfying.

Feb 2011; 80 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog include:

• Thomas Mann (1929) Death in Venice
• Hermann Hesse (1946) Steppenwolf and Demian
• Andre Gide (1947) The Immoralist and Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars
• William Faulkner (1949) Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying
• Albert Camus (1957) The Plague and The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus and The Fall
• John Steinbeck (1962) Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row
• Samuel Beckett (1969)  "The Expelled; The Calmative; The End & First Love" and "Waiting for Godot" 
• Heinrich Boll (1972) The Train was on Time 
• Saul Bellow (1976) "The Victim"
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982) Chronicle of a Death Foretold
• Doris Lessing (2007) The Golden Notebook
• Patrick Modiano (2014) The Black Notebook
• Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)  When We Were Orphans  and The Buried Giant