More Pricks Than Kicks (1934)

A quick (& overated) read?

It is not. ( )

When I came with a heavy heart to the end of the Becket Trilogy two choices presented themselves - I was hooked and so reading a non-Beckett next was out of the question, I needed another Beckett fix - the two choices were to go forward in his oeuvre - probably to Murphy which I knew I loved and the novel that most critics will claim as his greatest achievement as a novelist and that was probably key to his Nobel prize - my own choice as his greatest novel would be Imagination Dead Imagine but few would agree and maybe even fewer have actually read it - or to go back to his first novel More Pricks Than Kicks - and some would dispute that it is actually a novel (the same dispute would pertain to Imagine ... ).

I took the road less travelled and opened the book written in 1934 with some little trepidation and a very flimsy recollection of this book that I first read back in the 60s. Could an early work from my early reading experience live up to the masters (writer and reader)? The very first chapter or section or segment or story knocked me right back in my seat (OK I was reading it in bed but I am allowed some artistic licence here no?), All of Beckett's humour is there in a few pages. All his erudition (possibly a little too much). Hindsight is a wonderful thing and in this work all of Beckett's subsequent cosmos looms. The abyss is there, the futility, the hopelessness and the fun - all of them are there. In one chapter/segment ... And as the tales continue - following Belaqua -a man of no value - more and more of the human condition ( Beckett's obsession and muse) comes out of the beautifully crafted prose and slaps your face.

We follow this ordinary and worthless man through all of life - living, loving, party going (nodding to Henry Green here) and finally death and afterwards - we're with Sam B here. This is a tour de force by a young author who took the novel and the reader experience to places it had not been before. It is a wonderful act of creativity and if you are up to it it will bring forth from you a genuine human response. A work of art indeed. Brilliant work. ( )

The opening short story is one of the best ever written in English. Wry, perverse, witty and shrill. ( )

More Pricks than Kicks' is a book very difficult to describe. It consists of a number of what may be called short stories about Belacqua, a young Dublin man. The incidents themselves do not matter much, though one of them concerns Belacqua's death. The point of the story is in the style of presentation, which is witty, extravagant and excessive.

It consists of nine episodes in the career of a Dublin youth called Belacqua (the tenth episode is devoted to his widow). In them we learn something of his friends, his love affairs, his diversions, his abortive attempt at suicide and his marriages. Belacqua is a queer creature, a very ineffectual dilettante, much given to introspection and constantly involved in clownish misfortunes. The humour which Beckett extracts from the trivial and vulgar incidents which make up his career is largely achieved by bringing to bear on them an elaborate technique of analysis. Belacqua's preparations to eat a cheese sandwich, well 'fomented' with mustard and salt, occupy an important place in the first episode, which is one of the best.