Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Everyman's Library)
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator ofWaiting for Godot,Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deuxEndgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the  great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) fromJames Joyce,  and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer  him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a  more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, likeMurphyorWatt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride  with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces:Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward  nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself  to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be  the funniest writer on the planet--ever.None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to  summary. It's fair to say, though, thatMolloyis the easiest to read,  with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces.  In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out  how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales  all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I  lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former,  dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number  of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing  the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly  began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met  with, in this sense, long remained obscure.This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the  narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair  encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so  in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. SoMalone  Diesopens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead  at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hitThe  Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going  on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention.--James  Marcus