Mercier and Camier [Hardcover]

Samuel Beckett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1975

One of the most accessible examples of Samuel Beckett’s dark humor, Mercier and Camier is the hilarious chronicle of its two heroes’ epic journey. While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

About the Author

Samuel Beckett:
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity University in Dublin. In 1928, he visited Paris for the first time and fell in with a number of avant-garde writers and artists, including James Joyce. In 1937, he settled in Paris permanently. Beckett wrote in both English and French, though his best-known works are mostly in the latter language. A prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, he is remembered principally for his works for the theater, which belong to the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd and are characterized by their minimalist approach, stripping drama to its barest elements. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation." Beckett died in Paris in 1989.

At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000)

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 123 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press : distributed by Random House (1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802100783
• ISBN-13: 978-0802100788
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,035,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waiting for Poe, October 4, 2000

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[e-mail] (PARISFRANCE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mercier and Camier (Paperback)

Written in 1946, "Mercier and Camier" was Samuel Beckett's first postwar novel and his first in French. "Mercier and Camier" captures the time of depression and indecision in Beckett's life. It continues the line of vagabond heroes which begins with Belacqua in "More Pricks Than Kicks" and continues with "Murphy" and "Watt." They are the first of his vaudevillian couples, and this novel is in many ways the precursor of "Waiting for Godot." If there is a chronological line of development in his writing, "Mercier and Camier" surely marks the first tentative approach toward what Beckett calls the "mature" fiction of "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable." In the trilogy, Beckett relentlessly reduces his characters from pitiful creatures with few possessions--a hat, a pot, a stub of pencil--to voices, who have only the inner torments of their past life to sustain their present existence, doomed to repeat themselves until finally, even the voice, their last vestige of humanity, is stilled. There is no discernible setting, no tie with any real existence, and seemingly, no plot.

In "Mercier and Camier," the journey shapes the plot as the two men parade on an endless quest. Despite its somberness, it is in some ways a warm and funny book, occasionally tinged with stinging sarcasm. There are secondary characters, skillfully and swiftly delineated, so bizarre that even the two oddities of the title are struck by their madness. Mercier and Camier are otherworldly figures themselves, but they need the trappings of the real world in order to give their story coherence, and this is no doubt part of the reason why Beckett chose to abandon them and go on to the Malones and Malloys of his later fiction.

Just about this time, Beckett discovered that writing was for him the most intensely personal experience possible, depending not on verbal virtuosity or on the careful construction of the traditional novel. For him, creation satisfied only when he could plumb the depths of his unconscious, find an incident from his own life, and then work to conceal biography within the framework of his creative consciousness, changing dimensions of time and space according to the whim of his fictional voices. He reduces life to a series of tales, told first by one, then another (perhaps the same) voice, but all the voices are his.

Beckett perfected this method of writing novels when he discovered what he has called the most important revelation of his literary career--the first person monologue. He found he could create a multi-dimensional universe through the use of a voice telling a story. At the same time, this relentless voice could reveal character in its most desperate loneliness, stripping it as never before in contemporary fiction.

Written just before "Molloy," "Mercier and Camier" stands on the threshold of Beckett's mature fiction. There are large chunks of dialogue which he later transferred directly into Godot, but here speech is encumbered by a plot with progression and movement, albeit circuitous and often contradictory. There is a narrator, as in "Murphy" and "Watt," who occasionally intrudes to inject an acerbic comment and who thinks nothing of slowing down, speeding up, or otherwise circumventing the progress of the "pseudo-couple" (as they are called in "The Unnamable").

"Mercier and Camier" is about voluntary exile, much like Beckett's own. While it can be read as the odyssey of Beckett and the other young Irishmen who went to Paris in the 1930's hoping to gain the same success as their countryman of an older generation, James Joyce, it can also be read as two aspects of the personality of Beckett himself. Before his departure, he had been easily recognizable in Dublin by his shapeless, dirty raincoat, several sizes too large. He was plagued by recurring idiosyncratic cysts. When he wrecked his own car, he had continuous problems with his bicycle. In a drunken moment, he lost his favorite hat, which he mourned long afterwards.

It is the raincoat, however, which best symbolizes the final division of his first 30 years from the rest of his life, as well as this novel's place in his canon: when he left Dublin, Beckett threw his raincoat away, just as Mercier and Camier, after throwing theirs away, walk off into their own uncertain future, looking back now and again at the heap on the ground--unwilling to go on with it, but hesitant to abandon it...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A long walk nowhere..., January 26, 2008

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Mercier and Camier (Paperback)

*Mercier and Camier* may be my favorite work by Beckett--if not, then it's certainly on the shortlist. Indeed, it's one of my favorite novels of all time. Written around the period of *Waiting for Godot,* *Mercier and Camier* bears a good deal of similarity to Beckett's legendary play, except the two curmudgeonly protagonists of M&C are walking instead of waiting on futility.

Decrepit, degenerate, down-at-the-heels, Mercier and Camier are two mutually antagonistic friends who decide to set off one day on a journey. They're looking for something--or somewhere--but what they aren't exactly sure. They have a broken umbrella, one raincoat, a bicycle, and a sack between them. At one point or other, they lose, regain, and lose again even these scant belongings. Their laconic dialogue is peppered with insults, complaints, truncated rants, sarcasm, and, most of all, a confusion bordering on out-and-out senile dementia. They no sooner leave one station of their journey then they decide they must double back. It's always raining, or about to rain. As in a nightmare, for every two steps forward they seem to take two back. They don't get anywhere; which is apropos. They had no clue where they were going from the start.

Along the way, the two friends have various fallings-out and reconciliations, all over trivial matters. They come across various outlandish characters with whom they interact in the most oblique and frustrating of ways. They commit what should be a shocking act of senseless and unpremeditated violence which causes them to become fugitives--if they weren't fugitives already. But because of the dreamy surreality of the text that renders the emotional charge of murder equal to that of bickering about a fork in the road nothing seems more important than anything else and nothing seems important at all. Everything is flat-line, the same expanse of featureless gray.

Odd to say then that *Mercier and Camier* is a hilarious, slapstick novel--a read that will have you laughing out loud. On a universal scale, Beckett's gallows humor simply can't be topped. He's got the oft-mentioned "absurdity of the human condition" down the way no one has before or since. Slim, grim, and good for a grin, *Mercier and Camier* may be one of the most *perfect* novels ever written.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If it weren't written by Beckett..., September 16, 2010

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Zophorian - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mercier and Camier (Kindle Edition)

If it weren't written by Beckett it would be a cheap rip-off of Godot. But seeing as it is Beckett's, and was written before the great play, it is interesting and sheds light on things... well a bit of light.

For a Beckett fan it is a must. If you don't love Waiting For Godot, it will bore you.