The third of the three greatest novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, reissued for a new generation, introduced by Eimear McBride.
I can't go on, I'll go on.
The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words.
The Unnamable is the last of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his 'frenzy of writing' in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and Malone Dies.
A novel that will consume you like a fire. -- Kevin Barry
An experience unequalled anywhere in the universe of words. -- Paul Auster
The novelistic equivalent of abstract painting. ― New Yorker
He writes with a rhetoric and music that . . . make a poet green with envy. -- Stephen Spender
For lack of Beckett we shall all be damned. -- Jesse Ball
About the Author
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 and graduated from Trinity College. He settled in Paris in 1937, after travels in Germany and periods of residence in London and Dublin. He remained in France during the Second World War and was active in the French Resistance. From the spring of 1946 his plays, novels, short fiction, poetry and criticism were largely written in French. With the production of En attendant Godot in Paris in 1953, Beckett's work began to achieve widespread recognition. During his subsequent career as a playwright and novelist in both French and English he redefined the possibilities of prose fiction and writing for the theatre. Samuel Beckett won the Prix Formentor in 1961 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in December 1989.
