First Love And Other Novellas (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
The End / The Expelled / The Calmative/ First Love: These four novellas, though their sizes are more like short stories and they read as poetry, were written in 1946. They were originally written in French and later translated into English by the author and Richard Seaver.My psyche was gripped in a white-knuckled fist and scraped repeatedly against a grater. It amazed me how mere words, carefully selected and arranged on paper, could be so coarse yet sensitive like a cracked scab. That's how I felt while reading this book.I've read much about Beckett and his dark humor from literary critics. Though I found his prose in these stories like a chisel scraping on my bones and a bone injury is one of the most painful (exception: the small bit of script I've read from his play, Waiting for Godot, did leave me laughing).Out of the four shorts, I thought The End and First Love stood out the brightest (or darkest in this case).The EndAfter reading The End I just didn't feel the same. That short story was disturbing in a refreshingly haunting, feel-good way.My favorite word orders from The End:The little boys jeered and threw stones, but their aim was poor, for they only hit me once, on the hat. A policeman stopped us and accused us of disturbing the peace. My friend replied that we were as nature had made us, the boys too were as nature had made them. It was inevitable, under these conditions, that the peace should be disturbed from time to time.-------"And then of course there was the voice of the wind or rather those, so various, of its playthings."-------"As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour. To know I had a being, however faint and false, outside of me, had once had the power to stir my heart.First LoveAre we truly capable of Love? What is Love? Does it even matter? These are some of the questions Beckett put to me while reading this short story.Yes, I loved her, it's the name I gave, still give alas, to what I was doing then. I had nothing to go by, having never loved before, but of course had heard of the thing, at home, in school in brothel and at church, and read romances, in prose and verse, under the guidance of my tutor, in six or seven languages, both dead and living, in which it was handled at length.Why else would he inscribe her name in a pile of cow dung if not for love?Like in the story The End, the narrator is thrown out of his room where he just wants to wait out the end of his existence quietly, preferably in a room with no furniture, but in any case, away from people... he just wants to be. But then he happens to fall in love. He meets the lady on his bench, the bench he lays on between two dead trees. She asks to sit, he obliges but complains that he can no longer lay straight. She asks him to put his legs across her thighs and then rubs his ankles, and he gets an erection.Beckett's characters treat their bodily functions as an amusing distraction or intrusion; they defecate, urinate, itch, get erections and allow this to happen with as little effort as possible.In all four stories, the narrator confesses to urinating or defecating in his pants. In fact in the story The Expelled, the narrator, staggering down the sidewalk, a destitute old man, reflects back to when he was a young boy and what he believes is the cause of his crippling walk: ... and till bedtime I dragged on with burning and stinking between my little thighs, or sticking to my bottom, the result of my incontinence. Whence this wary way of walking, with the legs stiff and wide apart, and this desperate rolling of the bust, no doubt intended to put people off the scent, to make them think I was full of gaiety and high spirits, without a care in the world...Beckett again strings his carefully selected words in an order that had me scratching uncomfortably as I read through them. I had to read some passages twice and that just got me scratching twice as hard.While listening to his new love sing he talked about the song that he thought he heard before. I like the way he ended the sentence.It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, for of all the other songs I have heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physical impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough.And so this review has also gone on long enough…
بعض المقاطع التي أعجبتني، إلي حين عودة وقراءة ثانية لها قريبًا.-tوشعرت بتلك النفس المليئة بالملل والتي لا تكمل أي شيء، ولكنها ربما تكون أقل النفوس إزعاجًا للأخرين.-tأحدثها عن الاستلقاء فلا ترى سوي جسدي الممدد! إن ما كان يشغلني أنا، كملك بلا رعايا، هو الاستلقاء العقلي. وما كان استلقائي الجسدي إلا انعاكسا من تلك الانعكاسات التافهة والبعيدة التي يأخذها الغلاف الخارجي لفكرة الأنا ولتلك السفاسف المسمومة للفكرة التي يطلقون عليها الـ " لا أنا" وحتى للعالم كله من شدة الكسل.-tأيضًا الشيء الوحيد الذي أفهمه جيدًا هو آلامي. إنني أفكر في جميع آلامي كل يوم، تفكيري سريع وآلامي تمر سريعًا في ذهني بالرغم من أنها لا تأتي كلها من التفكير.-tثم إنني كنت لا أعرف آلامي جيدًا ربما لأنني لست آلاما فقط. هذا هو الخداع الماكر، إذن فلأهرب منه حتى الاندهاش، أو حتى الإعجاب بكوكب أخر. وهذا نادر ولكنه يكفيني. الحياة ليست غبية، لذا فإن الإنسان لا يمكن أن يكون مجرد آلام وإلا فما معنى الأشياء. أن يصبح الجميع منتحبين، شاكين ليس إلا، سيتحول الأمر إذن إلي منافسة مستمرة وغير شريفة أيضَا. -tوبما أن الدكة كانت مبتلة بشدة فإننا لم نجرؤ على الجلوس عليها. أخذنا نمشي ذهابا وإيابا وأمسكت بذراعها مدفوعا بنوع من الفضول فقد أردت أن أعرف إذا كان ذلك سيسعدني أم لا ولكنني لم أشعر بأي سعادة، لذا فقد تركت ذراعها. ولكن لماذا كل هذه التفاصيل؟ لتأخير الأجل. -tكنت أحب الجزر الأبيض لأن طعمه شبيه بطعم زهرة البنفسج وأحب زهرات البنفسج لأن لها رائحة الجزر الأبيض، وإذا لم يتواجد الجزر الأبيض في هذه الدنيا فإن زهر البنفسج لن يصبح محببًا إلي نفسي وإذا لم يتواجد زهر البنفسج فإن الجزر الأبيض سيصبح غير ذي أهمية بالنسبة لي – تماما- مثل الفجل واللفت.
What do You think about First Love And Other Novellas (2000)?
I wanted to like Beckett. Or maybe I didn't, I don't know, too many Godots not there, too many black curtains on Channel 4 in the dim 80s, too many underscores under the name in the books, not that I've read them, I just know they're there. There's an essay in the introduction to some Barthelme which posits a patriliterarchy (not a word, unless it now is) dribbling down from Joyce through Beckett to Barthelme, and I have a hard time swallowing that, not that I can't, but it's just so... I like Joyce, clever, funny, surprising, and Barthelme too, but maybe it skipped a generation. Beckett's clever, but neither funny really in any joyous sense of the word, which to me is what funny is really, a kind of joy I mean, though it's close to crying and sometimes they lead to each other, so I can be wrong. And I didn't find him surprising either, just spiky, or slathered, or something. Something like that. So I wanted to like Beckett but if he's part of that family of writers then he's the dark horse, the one they nod to but don't talk about, but can't disown. Whatever. I carried on and finished the book, to some extent, though whether it's ever really finished I can't say, but it's on the shelf anyway, behind other things, so who knows.TL;DR: It's Mr. Bean for nihilists.
—N.J. Ramsden
The basic story here is simple enough. Following the death of his father, the only member of his family who seems to have had any feelings for him, a man is evicted from the family home. He ends up moving in with a prostitute whereupon he immediately makes himself comfortable in his own Spartan way, emptying his room of all but a sofa on which he lies facing the wall doing nothing. For some reason the woman puts up with this but, when she falls pregnant, insisting that the child is his, he leaves literally while she is in the throes of childbirth, the sound of which haunts him for years.All the man wants is to be left alone. Because he exists in the real world his aloneness has to be relative and he does show himself willing to make some small compromises if only moving his feet so the prostitute, Lulu, can sit on a bench with him. The theme of the book hinges on the role of the father, the man's relationship with his own father and the prospect of becoming a father himself. He is ill-equipped to function in a relationship, the notion of them exists in his head but he has no practical use for them. Nor love it seems of any kind which he "understands" through books. He is willing to take and to allow things to be taken from him (e.g. the sex with woman is at her instigation) but enjoys little of a physical nature although wandering through graveyards does entertain him; he talks at length about them.The little book is full of word play (e.g. Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards…) and Beckett's dark humour and, in many respects, is his quintessential work albeit not his greatest. It is the perfect introduction to his world. It is easy to see Molloy, and Murphy in particular, in the unnamed protagonist but many of the themes he develops in later works are touched upon here.Like many of his works Beckett has made the text "vague" by removing personal details but it is the first of the works written between 1946 and 1950 that can be grouped under the general heading "the siege in the room", an expression Beckett coined to explain the shift in focus his writing took paring things down to the essential, the minimal, the unadorned, a world where the man in the story would feel completely at home.
—Jim
« Je me mis à jouer avec les cris un peu comme j''avais joué avec la chanson, m''avançant, m''arrêtant, m''avançant, m''arrêtant, si on peut appeler cela jouer. Tant que je marchais, je ne les entendais pas, grâce au bruit de mes pas. Mais sitôt arrêté je les entendais à nouveau, chaque fois plus faible certes, mais qu''est-ce que cela peut faire qu''un cri soit faible ou fort ? Ce qu''il faut, c''est qu''il s''arrête. Pendant des années, j''ai cru qu''ils allaient s''arrêter. Maintenant, je ne le crois plus. Il m''aurait fallu d''autres amours, peut-être. Mais l''amour, cela ce ne se commande pas.»
—Nikoo Alidoosti
