Beckett is another one of those authors that everybody gushes over and all, yet nobody seems to really speak of him, or read him for that matter. I still bought the trilogy and intend to read it though

his most famous work is about doing nothing but waiting around so probably not

>>25325550
>What's the point?
very funny OP

>>25325550
It's his comedic timing and autistic dedication to stage directions that impresses people. Also, if you was uncable of seeing the absurdist humour you're flatout retarded.
That being said, Endgame is Beckett's best play. Not read any of his novels, though.

>>25325550
>reading plays and not watching them
You can find the entirety of Happy Days on YouTube, it’s not hard.

>>25325560
Both critical and commercial interest in Beckett has wained in recent decades, though I still believe his work is incredibly important.

I've only read Waiting for Godot but really enjoyed it. It's like an absurdist three stooges bit.

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>Author of lovely novellas and wretched plays.
I'll agree with Nab on this one. The books are very funny and much more complex and interesting, even if you could reduce them to the same sentiment of a shrug.

>>25325550
read the beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) or his collected novellas and then you'll get it. probably his collected novellas is where I'd start, especially "The End"

keep in mind that beckett was basically joyce's amanuensis while the latter was writing the wake; lots of beckett's work can be characterized as a rebellion against his literary father, so to speak

basically all of beckett is about the interplay between language and reality -- how it's impossible for language to fully encompass the world but it's the only thing we have to describe it, how language creates an "I" that isn't the actual, real, fundamental "I" beneath the words, the sickening vertiginous rage against death paired with its inevitability tied to the idea that the words we paper over it with won't and can't save us, etc. he claimed he was writing "without style," which is obviously bullshit, but worth thinking about how he thought literary style was essentially a massive sham/trick that obscured what literature should do and be about

>>25326108
I'm going to read a few more Beckett plays and Waiting for Godot is definitely one of them, as it seems to be much more interesting

>>25326260
Thanks, I already have the Trilogy and will maybe check out his other prose works

Always saddens me that even in the limited beckett discourse on this website, people only ever want to do 3 things:
-shit on his plays
-celebrate his trilogy
-ignore How It Is

The latter makes me especially sad as it’s easily one of his best books and arguably the 4th part of the trilogy that encompasses and supersedes the previous ones.

>>25326838
What's the deal with How It Is?

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>>25327205

>>25325550
I saw a performance of this and didnt get anything out of it. I found it totally superficial and cynical. The humor is reddit level; clever and cute, gross. Just a form of masturbation.

>>25327330
Unlike masturbation there's no pleasure that comes from it

>>25325560
The trilogy is incredible but its also incredibly hard to talk about it. Three novels that in increasingly abstract ways fail to say nothing.

>>25327205
Simplest way to describe it is as a depiction of the 3rd circle of hell, a man lying in endless mud. The narrator is not the protagonist but rather a voice which speaks through/ventriloquises him; All events that “happen” in the book have either already happened, are about to happen, or never happened at all; and any narrative progress or resolution is scuppered by the rigorous formal constraints of the text, which are, even by Beckett’s standards, particularly strange

>>25325550
I found the Billie Whitelaw version on the internet archive recently after watching it on youtube over a decade ago, the only version available currently is dubbed in Greek.