Murphy, by Samuel Beckett

I am totally biased when it comes to Beckett. I love his writing. I know lots of people find it depressing and difficult but to me it's so achingly beautiful, so absolutely perfect, that I just... I dunno. I love it. So this review is probably not so very useful. I loved Murphy, not as much as the trilogy, but still quite a lot.

Murphy is definitely more, shall we say, accessible, than a lot of other Beckett works. It takes place in an identifiably concrete real world, it doesn't stray too terribly far more realistic probability, and it's not quite as extreme as his other works. So, for instance, where in the Trilogy you have the stone sucking monologue, which I happen to love but many people find a. confusing and b. in any case, far too long, here one has a similar idea, but rendered much more succinctly - Murphy and his biscuits.

He took the biscuits carefully out of the packet and laid them face upward on the grass, in order as he felt of edibility. They were the same as always, a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous. He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it the best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable. The order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him and varied irregularly from day to day. On his knees now before the 5 it struck him for the first time that this reduced to a paltry six the number of ways in which he could make his meal. But this was to violate the very essence of the assortment, this was red permanganate on the Rima of variety. Even if he conquered his prejudice against the anonymous, still there would be only twenty-four ways in which the biscuits could be eaten. But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!

This is the kind of thing that I dearly love in Beckett. But the book actually contains some loftier reflections as well, particularly in the section on madness, and they're more explicitly stated than is usual in his writings. It also is far less pessimistic, I think - the ending could even be said, in my mind, to be rather hopeful. This is, no doubt, because it's an early work, which doesn't really bode well for the universe, but still, if you find that Beckett grinds you down a bit much (myself, I find him a marvelous palliative when the world seems too much to deal with), then you might give this book a try.