More hits than misses in Beckett’s uneven novel
First published in 1934, this collection of ten short stories follows the misadventures of Belacqua in 1920s Dublin.
This collection of tragic-comic stories, titled More Pricks than Kicks, is worth reading for a number of reasons. It's the early work of a literary giant and, in places, it is either genuinely funny or enlightening. Nevertheless, the book is bound a little too tightly to its references, especially the Joycean ones, and some chapters are wilfully obtuse, begging the question of whether it is needlessly self-indulgent or evidence of a writer fully in control of all the book's narrative mechanics.
Those story devices are many and varied. Personally speaking, the instances of breaking the fourth wall were a bit tiresome, while leaving quotes untranslated from other languages was fun, lending a continental sparkle to the collection.
Source
http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/14850
Lost in the woods
And much like how our hero (anti-hero?) can get lost in the woods, I feel that analyses of the book can get lost in the minutiae of what everything means. This ignores some more obvious things. For one, the constant walking is not only a timeless trope, it's also a human reaction to anxiety and doubt. It's a way to fill some kind of hole with aimless wandering. Or what of the kitchen sink drama that are the relationships with Ruby and then Lucy? So much is left unsaid, and the story jumps between moments, the unknowns are tantalisingly left in the air. There is the sad reality of people settling, quietly in revolt, and grasping for a sense of meaning in what should be the normal rhythms of life. These moments are not charged so consciously with intellectual subtext. If anything, they are more immediate and impactful.
A literary curio
All in all, it's a literary curio, and as a springboard for further reading, quite rewarding. There are a lot of think pieces out there trying to get a handle on what it all means, and any historical retellings of Beckett and Joyce intersecting in Paris will always hold your interest. It's less than the sum of its parts, an often maddening whole, but the individual components, those short stories, have a magnetism that keeps your eyes mostly glued to the page.
