: Samuel Beckett
: Molloy
: Faber& Faber
: 9780571266852
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 331
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Molloy is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. Edited by Shane Weller

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 and graduated from Trinity College. He settled in Paris in 1937, after travels in Germany and periods of residence in London and Dublin. He remained in France during the Second World War and was active in the French Resistance. From the spring of 1946 his plays, novels, short fiction, poetry and criticism were largely written in French. With the production of En attendant Godot in Paris in 1953, Beckett's work began to achieve widespread recognition. During his subsequent career as a playwright and novelist in both French and English he redefined the possibilities of prose fiction and writing for the theatre. Samuel Beckett won the Prix Formentor in 1961 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in December 1989.

In March 1951, Les Éditions de Minuit, a small, financiallyinsecure Paris-based publishing house, released a new novel with the decidedly un-French titleMolloy. On the verso facing the title page, the publisher listed five other works by the same author: three novels.Murphy,Malonemeurt (MaloneDies) andL’Innommable (TheUnnamable), and two plays,Eleutheria andEnattendantGodot (WaitingforGodot). With the exception ofMurphy, however, all of these works were identified asforthcoming. As for the author of so much unpublished material, Samuel Beckett was known at the time only to a small circle of other European writers, painters and intellectuals, his principal publications – a short monograph on Marcel Proust (1931), a collections of short stories,MorePricksThanKicks (1934), and the novelMurphy (1938; French translation 1947) – having attracted some favourable reviews but few readers. Thatreputation was to be transformed irrevocably by the publication ofMolloy, followed byMalonemeurt in November of the same year andL’Innommable two years later, together with the full stage production ofGodot in January 1953.1 Indeed, by 1953 French reviewers were regularly placing Beckett in the company of some of the major writers of the century, including Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Camus.

For a sense of the critical affirmation with whichMolloy was received in France, one need look no further than the ‘press opinions’ displayed in an Éditions de Minuit advertisement printed in the Winter 1952–3 issue ofMerlin, an English-language literary magazine published in Paris, the editors of which were to be instrumental in the publication of the subsequent English translation ofMolloy by the Olympia Press in 1955. Theadvertisement includes the following critical judgements on the novel: ‘One of the most significant works to appear since the war’ (Jean Blanzat,LeFigarolittéraire); ‘Rarely since Kafka and Joyce have we experienced such … poetic depth’ (Max-Pol Fouchet,Carrefour); ‘Molloy is the expression of reality stripped ofinessentials’ (Georges Bataille);‘Molloy places Beckett certainly among the greatest writers’ (Maurice Nadeau,MercuredeFrance). To these judgements may be added the claim with which the American critic Richard Seaver opened his essay on Beckett in the Autumn 1952 issue ofMerlin: ‘Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer long established in France, has recently published two novels which, although they defy all commentary, merit the attention of anyone interested in this century’s literature.’2

Begun in Ireland on 2 May 1947 and completed in France only six months later, on 1 November 1947,Molloy belongs with a number of other major prose and dramatic works written by Beckett between 1946 and 1951, including not only those listed as forthcoming in the first edition ofMolloy but also four long stories (all written in 1946) and thirteen short texts (written in 1950–1, after the completion ofL’Innommable), published together asNouvellesetTextespourrien in 1955. This remarkable ‘frenzy of writing’ – as Beckett was to describe it3 – commenced