Rating: 
Summary: Just Confusion; or Does it Make sense after all?
Review: Samuel Beckett's works here present a painstakingly crafted alternate dimension of the mind. The myriad of expression and wordings of this trilogy is unparalleled in any other works I have read. The books forcibly immerse the reader into the twisted experiences of the characters, scrawling the pages with absolutely lucid confusion. Very very very difficult reading, but if you can make your way through the convoluted prose, Samuel Beckett's storytelling draws and leads masterfully within these works. Reading these, I seldom came back up to breathe.
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Summary: This edition makes it nice
Review: The above reviewers have said enough and nicely that in terms of Beckett. Get this editon. It holds nicely, the pages not only turn well with easy indention of the fingertip, they feel nice. Everyman's editions are foresighted enough to sew in a ribbon marker for that quote of the day or night or hour. The introduction is wonderful - economic and yet fulfilling - the intersection of Kierkegaard's idea of the Author and our own realization of the Author Beckett reigning in the excess of post-Finnegan AuthorJoyce brings clarity to these readings.
Rating: 
Summary: A Throughly Modern Novel
Review: The Everyman's Library is a wonderful edition and does Beckett and the modern novel justice as an artist and a art formIn Molloy you will read over a 100 pages with no paragraphs. There is little in the way of plot, characters, dialog,etc. If you want to "read" a modern novel, here it is. Kind of like atonal music. Intellectually you know you are supposed to be
impressed,but it is very hard to "get it". Malone is somewhat easier to read with two characters and paragraphs but that is as about far as Beckett will go in accomodating his readers. Nobody does much,or goes anywhere. I can be as patient as the next reader. After all I actually read War and and even Joyce's Ulysses.This was my third shot at Beckett's Big Three. But finally I gave up again. I guess this
stuff is just over my head.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant in everyway
Review: The first real novel about art, writing, consciousness, identity and humanity all rolled into an unalloyed fierce centre of integrity.
Rating:
Summary: Old and sick and dying and singing
Review: The lyric of the old fading consciousness has no better voice in literature than Beckett. He tells the tale of human life at its end in his own language of musical feeling. It will not exactly cheer you up but will give you the feeling of a very distinct individual creative voice. The question of course is how much of this stuff the person can take. Mailer said of Beckett ' we are not all impotent' but at the age of ninety Malone may be right.
I wonder however if there is not another way of thinking about the last time of fading, and suspect that there is. The Jewish idea that the great are informed thirty days before their death of the impending event and can thus prepare and part from their loved ones with dignity, is something to keep in mind as an alternative. "When I go we all goes" says Joyce Beckett's great teacher , but who knows maybe there is a more honorable way of going in which we think more about those we are leaving behind than we do about our own lonely journey to the next world, or not.
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Summary: "...the high-water mark of...Modernism"
Review: The quotation reproduced above comes from the inside front flap of the dustcover of the Everyman's Library edition, and while such flaps in Everyman rarely reveal much about the contents of the books they cover, this quotation seems quite appropriate. People seem to be upset by Beckett's techniques in writing these novels. Some have even alleged that Beckett (gasp!) has attempted to write a novel without any features of a normal novel. This misses the point of modernism and, while some reviewers may prefer the linearity of the traditional novel (while not, of course, being bad at literary criticism), this misconception of linearity must be corrected. Whereas writers like Conrad (even though Conrad never admitted being an Impressionist writer) cast a haze over his prose desciptions to obscure his readers' vision, modernists give us crisp clarities, but provide us with only the minutest of details. Here, we see the influence of abstract art on literature--especially the dynamism of Marcel Duchamp. By this I mean that modernists attempted to show all stages of motion at once, as in Duchamp's famous painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2"--the nude is depicted as a brown blur, and Duchamp shows all stages of the nude's descent. In modernist literature, there are frequent references to earlier events, and there are references to future events. This is evident in _Ulysses_, an epic work of modernism by James Joyce, from whom Beckett himself learned numerous literary techniques. But also, we see the strong influence Proust had on Beckett. In what has been called, by some critics, the greatest novel written (A la recherche du temps perdu, or Remembrance of Things Past), Proust attempted to write a novel in which the main theme was memory. Proust takes a bite of a Madeleine pastry, and through association, remembers all his life when this bite invokes a childhood memory. But Beckett writes often of people who can remember hardly anything at all: in _Waiting for Godot_, Vladimir and Estragon can barely remember past yesterday. What is meant by this? I believe, Beckett is saying that in this modern (and, by his later career, postmodern) world, we can find nothing that will invoke memory. Our childhoods do not contain high times with tea and Madeleines. Furthermore, his characters do not have anything, even if their childhoods did have the comforts of Proust's (which is highly unlikely). People are also often startled by the stream-of-consciousness technique used by modernists. But with Beckett, this technique was a means of filling the silence of loneliness. Molloy sees only this man who comes to take away the pages and give him money. Modern humanity is alone; therefore, humans mutter to themselves to pass the time and fill the void. In works of modernism, we find the constant themes of dynamism memory, and the loneliness of humankind; especially in Beckett's work. I hope that this review has been helpful to those who feel intimidated by Beckett's work: sometimes a few small bits of criticism can get you thinking well and deeply when reading a work.
Rating:
Summary: Fresh air in the stale world of words
Review: The rythym of the trilogy pounds away at the stale and leaves you with a renewed sense that writing as an art form is far from dead.
Rating:
Summary: The greatest writer of the twentieth century
Review: These three novels are the best of the 20th century.
They contain all the beauty, despair, and spareness that makes Beckett the patron writer of our century. They get at the core of what it means to be a self in the midst of the void, having, against one's will, a self's attendant thoughts, words, stories, and imagination. "I, say I. Unbelieving" says Beckett in the first line of The Unnamable, and you can believe him. These novels are as metaphysical as novels get, asking sincerely what it means to be. And asking just as sincerely if language can ever help us figure that out.
Each novel, with Molloy on his crutches, Malone in his death-bed, The Unnamable in his skull, is screamingly funny and cryingly horrible. Beckett's sense of the absurd and the ridiculous are only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge and overwhelming but strangely life-affirming pessimism, which helps us go on as we laugh at the world's collection of whimsies. There are no novels better. There are few funnier. There are none containing more truth.
Rating:
Summary: The greatest writer of the twentieth century
Review: These three novels are the best of the 20th century. They contain all the beauty, despair, and spareness that makes Beckett the patron writer of our century. They get at the core of what it means to be a self in the midst of the void, having, against one's will, a self's attendant thoughts, words, stories, and imagination. "I, say I. Unbelieving" says Beckett in the first line of The Unnamable, and you can believe him. These novels are as metaphysical as novels get, asking sincerely what it means to be. And asking just as sincerely if language can ever help us figure that out. Each novel, with Molloy on his crutches, Malone in his death-bed, The Unnamable in his skull, is screamingly funny and cryingly horrible. Beckett's sense of the absurd and the ridiculous are only matched by his encyclopedic knowledge and overwhelming but strangely life-affirming pessimism, which helps us go on as we laugh at the world's collection of whimsies. There are no novels better. There are few funnier. There are none containing more truth.
Rating:
Summary: A work of art
Review: This is a clever, funny book. Unnameable (aka "Unreadable") is some tough going, but Molloy and Malone Dies are quite clever. What I found most interesting here was the extreme literary "inwardness" (I think H. Kenner said it first so I won't take credit for it). Everything is at its most unromantic...its most physical. It provides an interesting contrast when put up against the ever-expanding branching out of Ulysses. In Ulysses, everything is connected to something and ends in an optimistic comment on the universe. In Molloy and Malone Dies, nothing is connected to anything.
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