Mercier and Camier, Beckett’s first postwar novel and his
first in French, has been described as a forerunner of his most
famous work, Waiting for Godot. Like the play, Mercier and Camier
revolves around two wandering vagabonds. Their journey is described
as relatively easy going, with no frontiers or seas to be crossed.
The reader never knows where the journey starts or where it ends
and the novel is less about the characters’ physical progress than
their exchanges regarding the meaning of their journey, their
goals, and life in general. One of Beckett’s more accessible works,
Mercier and Camier is one of his early endeavors to experiment with
structure and reimagine the novel as it had been known.
關於作者:
Samuel Beckett:
Samuel Beckett 1906-1989, one of the leading literary and
dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock,
Ireland and attended Trinity University in Dublin. In 1928, he
visited Paris for the first time and fell in with a number of
avant-garde writers and artists, including James Joyce. In 1937, he
settled in Paris permanently. Beckett wrote in both English and
French, though his best-known works are mostly in the latter
language. A prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poetry,
he is remembered principally for his works for the theater, which
belong to the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd and are
characterized by their minimalist approach, stripping drama to its
barest elements. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of
man into his exaltation." Beckett died in Paris in 1989.
At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished
concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more
chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is.
Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need
to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes
no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the
greatest possibility." from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George
Plimpton, 2000