i'm not the king of comedy
When I was a teenager I went through a period where I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut novels. This is not terribly surprising. It wasn't until the very end of my Vonnegut phase, or just after it, that I found out that most people seem to think he is a "funny" author. This was a surprise, because I found him to be a "suicidally depressing" author, the sort of author you'd read to wallow in your "better to have never been born" feelings.
Tonight I read Samuel Beckett's Murphy, which I had tried to read a while back, but only got a few pages into. It is a funny book, his first published novel, before he caught on to his more familiar style, back when he still labored under the shadow of Joyce. There are all these great set scenes -- a terrific moment when all the characters come up with a different way to avert their eyes, for instance. The plot seems to largely exist to give Beckett a chance to think up clever writerly things to do. We like novels like this, although we often wish they'd get rid of the novel part and just do the clever writerly things. But the novel is a good excuse to be inspired to do such things, I suppose.
But of course it's also Beckett, and while it's hard to really care about any of these characters or their intricate machinations (it's almost a Wodehouse novel, if Wodehouse had been a depressive ex-pat who killed someone off every few chapters to keep the plot chugging along), nevertheless Beckett's bleak outlook and his characters' drives to escape themselves and their "human condition" are, well, depressing. But then again, I was never very good at separating comedy from tragedy, whether it's finding comedy painfully tragic, or finding comedic gallows humor in painful situations. I am either broken or agile that way.
(Also, yay for the term being basically over and having enough energy to read a short novel in one night!)
In the book, one of the characters keeps a copy of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Bouvier's "Supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio" under his pillow for naughty reading. It appears to be a 19th c. treatise on sex, or something like that, and it's quoted in some histories of contraception. But my school's library doesn't have it, and Google Books only has it in snippet view. Grr!
Tonight I read Samuel Beckett's Murphy, which I had tried to read a while back, but only got a few pages into. It is a funny book, his first published novel, before he caught on to his more familiar style, back when he still labored under the shadow of Joyce. There are all these great set scenes -- a terrific moment when all the characters come up with a different way to avert their eyes, for instance. The plot seems to largely exist to give Beckett a chance to think up clever writerly things to do. We like novels like this, although we often wish they'd get rid of the novel part and just do the clever writerly things. But the novel is a good excuse to be inspired to do such things, I suppose.
But of course it's also Beckett, and while it's hard to really care about any of these characters or their intricate machinations (it's almost a Wodehouse novel, if Wodehouse had been a depressive ex-pat who killed someone off every few chapters to keep the plot chugging along), nevertheless Beckett's bleak outlook and his characters' drives to escape themselves and their "human condition" are, well, depressing. But then again, I was never very good at separating comedy from tragedy, whether it's finding comedy painfully tragic, or finding comedic gallows humor in painful situations. I am either broken or agile that way.
(Also, yay for the term being basically over and having enough energy to read a short novel in one night!)
In the book, one of the characters keeps a copy of Bishop Jean-Baptiste Bouvier's "Supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio" under his pillow for naughty reading. It appears to be a 19th c. treatise on sex, or something like that, and it's quoted in some histories of contraception. But my school's library doesn't have it, and Google Books only has it in snippet view. Grr!