The Unnamable [Paperback]

Samuel Beckett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1958

Translated from the French by the author the Unnamable was published by Grove Press in five editions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 179 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (Evergreen Imprint); First Edition edition (1958)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000C9TM08
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,076,417 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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, February 6, 2007

By 

A. J. Mcleod (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Unnamable (Modern Classics) (Audio CD)

This is absolutely fantastic

a beautiful performance.

thank godot the actor is irish.

in my humble opinion an american accent would not have worked

Its the best book I have heard scince Jeremy Irons reading Lolita

but dont forgeot to get the other two in the trillogy as well

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange pain, strange sin, January 10, 2010

By 

Noddy Box (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unnamable (E-1117) (Paperback)

Tired in the end of his puppets and dummies, the ventriloquist interrogates his gift. I mean his curse. It's not certain. In this dense matter of voices nothing is certain. Except perhaps for the reader the certain exhilaration of getting lost in Beckett's most sustained and vertiginous wordy-gurdy. The Unnamable may very well be the closest old Sam ever came to writing his autobiography. Mayhaps too begob the last and purest yield of prose from that famous siege in the room. In any event there's nothing quite like this novel in the realms of the written word. Beckett even includes a bit where one of his vice-existers, the first one, Mahood I think, the character with only the one leg to stand on, but maybe it's the second felly, I can't quite keep them all straight in me head, but this particular lump anyway speaks of being liberally supplied with painkillers, which he never hesitates to take. The detail seemed a throwaway, an unimportant aside, but it snagged on my combat jacket. The notion of painkillers crops up in one or two other places in the stories and novels. I've always wondered about Sam's line of thinking here. Of course it goes without saying that repeated and unimpeded recourse to a temporary palliative is in most cases devoutly to be wished, shades of Emily Dickinson's little anodyne and all that, but there's something more here I think. Does Beckett mean that pain kills art or that art kills pain? Or both? Or, God help us, neither? Personally I'm going with both. I was just this past minute mooching about in a gazebo, sheltering against the rain as it happened, just like Mercier and Camier in fact, waiting for the library to open and miserably failing yet again in my ever ongoing effort to be finally shot of cheroots. Still, ten odd smokeless days is not too shabby this go-round. In any event, Beckett's painkillers suddenly came to mind like a revelation riding to the rescue. Here's what I eventually supposed in this connection: Painkillers do sometimes kill pain, that's why they're called painkillers, surely. They do on occasion actually work and should not be sneezed at by anyone who's ever had the inestimable gift of life rammed down their gullet. Nice one Sam, you do pose some elegant little teasers, don't ya? And no more so than here in The Unnamable--an unforgettable conclusion to your confounded trilogy.

5.0 out of 5 stars I feel so relieved to have finally finished this, like making it to the peak of a challenging mountain., October 25, 2011

By 

Wobert (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unnamable (Paperback)

It's an amazing work of genius, but very difficult and slow going. It's more of a modernist prose poem than it is a traditional novel, and if it's read in that way, taking time to savor each of the dazzling ideas that pack each page, then the task is a little easier, but still not easy. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the other two novels in the Beckett Trilogy, but that doesn't mean that it was any less great as a work of literature.