“Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school,” says Martin Amis. “On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible, and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.” This isn’t entirely fair – Beckett was capable of sentences, even paragraphs. Even a 90-page paragraph that comprises the entire first half of this fuckin’ book here, which is about some knucklehead who farts. “One day I counted them,” Molloy says. “Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes.” Have you, friend, ever counted your farts?
The second half features Moran, the world’s worst dad, as he forces an enema up his kid. They wander through the countryside; he’s looking for Molloy, perhaps to interrogate him for some murky reason. He’s a detective? An assassin? Along the way he murders a guy for no real reason. Molloy killed a guy too. Their voices are similar(ly unhinged). The theory goes that perhaps we’ve skipped backwards, Moran is young Molloy, he’s hunting down his future. That is of course a very college seminar thing to say, a very Lit Major theory, and “It is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran tells us, “that I intend to give way to literature.” But have we? Given way to literature? If so, how many farts did it take?
Good Reads
Alex
4 Stars