The furor raised by his play, "Waiting for Godot," is likely to attract uninitiated readers to Samuel Beckett's novels. It is also likely that a good many will be disappointed, for the destruction of usual literary form, only partly achieved in "Godot," is here carried much further. "Godot" had no plot in the usual sense but it had enough dramatic bustle to keep the spectator amused, and the characters (through the persons of the actors) had an identity. 

    In "Malone Dies" we can hardly be sure of much more than that Malone, whoever he is, is dying and at the end is dead; the rest is nightmare. While dying he tells himself a few stories; the names change, the figures blur, they may be different persons or the same person, or figments of Malone's own personality. (Who is so sure of personal identity, anyway?) At the end the nightmare becomes more violent, crowded, hallucinatory. The writing stops, Malone is dead. 

   Unpromising material for a novel, it would seem. Read rapidly, as we do most novels that have a story, this book will seem monotonous and palling, and to the more physically squeamish reader rather disgusting. But Mr. Beckett cannot be read in the way of the ordinary novel; you have to take him in short gulps, coming back again and again. This way the book establishes its power. 

   Mr. Beckett himself writes rather like a wounded bird, in short stabbing flights, never getting far into the air before he falls back, but wonderfully moving in these tiny arcs. After such rereading my own initial disappointment gave way to the conviction that his trio of novels--"Malloy," "Malone" and "The Nameless One"--are more powerful and important than "Godot." 

   What this author is attempting recalls what some abstract painters have been doing--emptying the canvas of all recognizable forms, yet keeping a surface that is visually exciting. Mr. Beckett seeks to empty the novel of its usual recognizable objects--plot, situation, characters--and yet to keep the reader interested and moved. And he frequently succeeds, with all the cards stacked against him. 

   But why do this, the reader may ask. Why push any form of art toward the edge of nothingness? Well, first it is always a challenge to see how far one can go in any direction. Second, the kind of experience Samuel Beckett gets across is really a larger portion of life than most of us are willing to admit even to ourselves. 

   If the words, "positive" and "negative" (like "right" and "left" in politics) had not lost most of their meaning by this time, I should say that Beckett is one of the most positive writers alive. Behind all his mournful blasphemies against man there is real love. And he is genuine: every sentence is written as if it had been lived.