No need to actually read him now

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

Don't know much about Samuel Beckett and his works? Me neither, but I know more now having read the above article. The author seemingly admires Beckett, but many of his comments do nothing to encourage this blogger to actually read him:

Emptying his books of plot, descriptions, scene, and character, Beckett is said to have killed off the novel—or else, by showing how it could thrive on self-sabotage, insured its future....

One of the most purposely obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people...

The Beckett of the novels is not a very efficient writer—exhaustion is his method—but he can probably condense more cackling blasphemies onto a single page than anyone else....

...Beckett is, however, a hard read. His plays continue to be performed, but as a novelist—and he considered playwriting “mainly a recreation from working on the novel”—he is increasingly more honored than read. This is too bad, because Beckett’s fiction, whether or not it is the summit of his achievement, is its heart. Meanwhile, vague and grand ideas about Beckett flourish because he goes unread. “A voice comes to one in the dark”: this, the first line of the late novella “Company,” also describes the ideal situation of his contemporary reader, as innocent and as apprehensive as that, as ready to be startled. Strange stuff, this work, that life.

The article usefully extracts some bits from Beckett's novels, just to confirm how tiresome reading him can be:

Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door . . .

Think Beckett can’t go on? He can go on. In this case, for another thirty lines.

Good of the New Yorker to confirm a suspicion that I am not missing anything, other than tedium.