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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
Perhaps the most pleasurable little read in all of Beckett's oeuvre, Mercier and Camier is a brutally bleak and hysterically funny little romp. Only the expat from Foxrock could come up with such a perfectly mid-20th-century mixture of fear, loathing, and Devil-may-care glee. It's a perfectly cut little gem of a book: by turns lyrical, self-deprecating, bleak, even brutal in one scene, and all the while peppered with truly funny witticisms and clever double entendres (plus an orgy! If sex in three counts as an orgy that is). What the hell more could you ask from a novel? Less than 200 pages? You got it! How's about a brief synopsis every two chapters so I can easily review what I've just read. No problem at all. The author is happy to oblige.
For all of the above I'm giving it the full 5 stars even if I have one small criticism. The novel does, stylistically, cover a bit of the same ground as Murphy, which wouldn't bother me at all had monsieur Beckett made a career out of only writing absurdist humor, but I had thought that "First Love" and the three stories from Stories and Texts for Nothing to have begun charting new vistas--those incessant voices of the trilogy of novels to come, the loss of the intrusive narrator, the growing subtlety of the humor, making the bleakness less silly and more darkly absurd and therefore disturbing--and I had praised him in my reviews of those texts for having moved on after the near-perfection of the style in Murphy. Here, however, there's a slight return to the obtrusive third person narrator who claims to have been there at the text's opening but is never anywhere to be found. There's also a kind of coda in the last chapter--did S. B. feel compelled to make their number come out even so as to retain the pattern of the synopses?--in which Watt appears and even recalls Murphy by name. It wasn't really necessary and is not the novel's strongest section. Perhaps Mercier and Camier is the true finale of Beckett's first period, the novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and the excerpts and stories collected into More Pricks than Kicks. (Note the odd reliance on the m and k sounds, something there I think--I wonder what?)
At any rate 1946 was a terrific year for our boy as he capped his early darkly humorous style with this little gem, got started on the new style of interior monologue that he would follow into the early 1950s in three fabulous novels also named after men with second initial M., and--as you may have assumed from the two names making up the title here--had already hit on the dramatic device of absurdist dialogues between a pair of inert old fossils trying to decide what to do and where to go, which he would repeat in Waiting for Godot, and which would make him an international sensation. A very good year indeed.
For all of the above I'm giving it the full 5 stars even if I have one small criticism. The novel does, stylistically, cover a bit of the same ground as Murphy, which wouldn't bother me at all had monsieur Beckett made a career out of only writing absurdist humor, but I had thought that "First Love" and the three stories from Stories and Texts for Nothing to have begun charting new vistas--those incessant voices of the trilogy of novels to come, the loss of the intrusive narrator, the growing subtlety of the humor, making the bleakness less silly and more darkly absurd and therefore disturbing--and I had praised him in my reviews of those texts for having moved on after the near-perfection of the style in Murphy. Here, however, there's a slight return to the obtrusive third person narrator who claims to have been there at the text's opening but is never anywhere to be found. There's also a kind of coda in the last chapter--did S. B. feel compelled to make their number come out even so as to retain the pattern of the synopses?--in which Watt appears and even recalls Murphy by name. It wasn't really necessary and is not the novel's strongest section. Perhaps Mercier and Camier is the true finale of Beckett's first period, the novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and the excerpts and stories collected into More Pricks than Kicks. (Note the odd reliance on the m and k sounds, something there I think--I wonder what?)
At any rate 1946 was a terrific year for our boy as he capped his early darkly humorous style with this little gem, got started on the new style of interior monologue that he would follow into the early 1950s in three fabulous novels also named after men with second initial M., and--as you may have assumed from the two names making up the title here--had already hit on the dramatic device of absurdist dialogues between a pair of inert old fossils trying to decide what to do and where to go, which he would repeat in Waiting for Godot, and which would make him an international sensation. A very good year indeed.
Follows a bumbling, bickering couple on the road to nowhere as they attempt to leave and return to their city (not identified but clearly Dublin).
Full of banter, sarcasm, and props (a raincoat, an umbrella (parasol!), and a sack). Becket can land a joke. Sometimes with a delayed delivery but always well-timed. One finishes the book thinking nothing happened, despite the death of a policeman (and who knows what really happened to the parrot).
Can’t help but read this as a prelude to Waiting for Godot.
Full of banter, sarcasm, and props (a raincoat, an umbrella (parasol!), and a sack). Becket can land a joke. Sometimes with a delayed delivery but always well-timed. One finishes the book thinking nothing happened, despite the death of a policeman (and who knows what really happened to the parrot).
Can’t help but read this as a prelude to Waiting for Godot.
Soms irritant en saai, meestal geestig en vol pracht. Met natuurlijk heerlijke dialogen.
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feels like because of the way it was translated and the time in which it was originally written the piece reads like a conglomeration of most if not all the ideas beckett brooded about during his whole career. the unfortunate thing is that not many of them resonate as strongly as other pieces tackling the same topics did. nevertheless it was a fun ride and it was more comedic than I expected with hilarious situations even more than "murphy," but look to his other works to gain more poetic accountings of modern claustrophobia and exhaustion
funny
medium-paced
Reading this long after reading Godot and the Trilogy, which preceded it, make it seem a little played out, but that's unfair given it was a dry run for a lot of that. Still, if you've read those this is very much of the same cloth, probably too much for many.
It's been getting harder and harder for me to write about books when they are essentially indescribable, and hard to get a hold of because they're slippery. And then I've been noticing that my best thinking about these books comes at night, or in the early morning, when I'm half asleep. My mind roams more freely, finds the right words, ideas, connections. But during the day, they're gone. I can't get them back anymore. (Like a dream, yes, I didn't want to say it, but I did.) That's why my first "review" of this was a sort of chapter by chapter summary, mostly using one word adjectives, but also short phrases (not so cleverly stealing from the book itself). But I'm deleting it now and replacing (correcting) it with this. But what is this? I want to talk about the movement in the book, how the characters walk, stagger, sit, hold hands, keep apart, but also about how this interrogation of movement reaches almost perfection in Molloy. Of course, we "meet" Mercier and Camier again in Molloy, just as we meet Watt here (and also in Molloy). (Or are they all just figments of their own imagination?) And I want to talk about not knowing, and artificiality, about inventing, and imagination, about improvisation (of self and art), about the process of all of the above. I want to talk about the hilarity of Camier going to get a cream pie for Mercier, but coming back with a Neapolitan babà, which makes Mercier cry and he crushes it in his hands. I want to talk about the repetition ("J'ai froid, dit Camier. Il faisait froid, en effet. Il fait froid, en effet, dit Mercier" [p27]). I want to talk about the sky ("On parle beaucoup du ciel..." [p55]). I want to talk about that voice in your head ("La petite voix implorante, dit Camier, qui nous parle parfois de vies antérieures..." [p83]). I want to talk about the absurdity, irony, and realism of two characters resolved to go on a journey, on a quest even, a quest for they know not what, and never doing anything except discuss it, imagine it (it is of course a cliche that it's the journey that counts, not getting there). I want to talk about the fact that the narrator is deciding, perhaps reluctantly, to tell us this story; he didn't have to tell it ("Le voyage de Mercier et Camier, je peux le raconter si je veux... " [p1]), but he was a witness ("...car j’étais avec eux tout le temps."), an "enveloping presence" [p149]. I want to talk about slowness and circumspection because I tend to be slow and circumspect ("Que notre devise soit donc lenteur et circonspection..." [p96]), but let's not forget the power of chance and intuition. I want to talk about what really matters, or is one thing the same as another? I want to talk about forgetting (didn't I already?) I want to talk about time and tense, life and death, the paradox of not knowing and knowing too much, so many things happening that a book couldn't contain them, and so we're left with nothing, nothing to do, nothing to say ("...il se passe à chaque instant plus de choses que n'en pourrait contenir un gros livre, deux gros livres, le tien et le mien. C'est sans doute à cette exubérance que l'on doit la bienfaisante sensation qu'il n'y a rien, rien à faire, rien à dire."[p127])
I don't think I was made to appreciate Beckett. Sorry, library recommendation shelf.