Molloy

It is a landscape that has literally organized itself around a man's absolute refusal to admit to the crime he committed.

From Flann O'Brien's cosmic police, we move to Samuel Beckett's cosmic tramps, specifically his 1951 novel, Molloy.

Beckett, of course, was Joyce's secretary for a time, but to escape Joyce's massive shadow, he did something radical.

He originally wrote Molloy in French, and then translated it himself into an English that was entirely stripped of all its traditional Irish lyrical cadences, rebuilt down to the bare, unadorned bones.

The plot consists of two narratives that never quite meet.

First, Molloy, a vagrant on a bicycle with failing legs, is trying to reach his mother's room, but he refuses to do it in any way that resembles a normal plot.

Second, Moran, a very prim, organized, cruel agent, is sent by a mysterious agency to hunt Molloy down.

And as Moran searches the countryside, his body breaks down, and he slowly, terrifyingly dissolves into the very tramp he is hunting.

Reading Ulysses at 17, equal parts genuine interest and teenage bravado taught me that it's possible to not understand most of a book and yet still find it profound and meaningful.

This lesson really hit home a few years later when I read Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy, published in French in 1951 and in English translation in 1955.

It also had the unintended effect of making me properly aware of what would eventually become my career, literary translation.

Like much of Beckett's work, Molloy is hard to categorise and even harder to summarise.

Conveniently, however, it is split into two distinct parts.

The first, which features no paragraph breaks, is narrated by Molloy, a typical Beckettian

vagrant

who embarks upon a fruitless quest to see his aged mother.