I almost quit this book as soon as I began it. It launches the reader into the mind of an unnamed character lying on his deathbed and babbling on about basic details that he himself did not know or understand. He then proceeds to tell a mundane story in unfocused detail and with distracting metacommentary. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler begins in a similar way. Perhaps Molloy was an inspiration.

The text was dense not only in style but also in line spacing. A paragraph break on the second page and then no more in sight. But I decided to push through. I motivated myself by striving to read as many pages as possible in one sitting. This worked well. Once I’d waded in far enough, giving up was much less tempting. It was satisfying to have made ample progress and, along the way, I’d begun enjoying the book. The experience was like going for a run. The first few minutes were uncomfortable and almost nauseating, but then I hit my stride and momentum carried me forth.

I read most of the book in two or three weeks. Then I let my attention drift towards other things. (Movies including The Godfather, YouTube videos, the audiobook

, and the book The Neoliberal City.) Then I returned to it and read the last chunk over a few days. Soon after I finished the book I watched several reviews about it on YouTube and ended up rewriting the Plot Summary section of the Wikipedia page, which I found glaringly incomplete, poorly written, and partly contaminated with interpretation. Here it is after I finished rewriting it:

The novel is about two characters and is divided into two parts. Each part is an internal monologue, the first of Molloy and the second of Jacques Moran.

Part One consists of two paragraphs: the first spans about two pages and the second more than eighty. The book opens with the narrator stating that he lives in his mother’s room, but does not remember how he arrived there or when his mother died. In this room he writes and every Sunday a man visits to pick up what he has written and bring back what he had taken last week “marked with signs” that Molloy never cares to read. Molloy writes to “speak of the things that are left, say [his] goodbyes, finish dying”. In the second paragraph, which comprises most of Part One, Molloy recounts a journey he took supposedly to find his mother. Throughout the journey, he struggles to remember that his aim is to meet his mother and finds himself endlessly sidetracked and delayed. Molloy suffers from severe physical disabilities, and so relies on his bicycle and his crutches for mobility. At one point, he gets momentarily arrested for resting on his bicycle in a lewd way. It is when speaking to the police in the station that we finally learn his name, which suddenly comes to him and he cries out while being questioned. Soon after his release, Molloy wanders through town and accidentally kills an old dog by running over it with his bicycle. A vicious mob starts forming, but then Molloy is rescued by the dog’s owner who forgives him and takes him into her home. He is fed, bathed, clothed, and allowed to live on the premises for free. Despite this, Molloy resents the woman – whose name he can’t quite remember: “a Mrs Loy… or Lousse, I forget, Christian name something like Sophie” – and after a long time finally musters the determination to leave, without his bicycle. Soon afterwards, he finds a place in an alley to harm himself, which brings him satisfaction. He remembers an old woman who used to compensate him for having intercourse with her and with whom he considers, absurdly, to have known true love. Molloy then journeys out of town towards the shore, having again forgotten his objective of finding his mother. He tells of living by the ocean for a while and describes in excruciating detail his process of circulating sixteens “sucking stones” across his four pockets to maximize the amount of time between which each stone is sucked. Eventually he leaves the shore and journeys through the woods. There, he encounters a man who appears to need help but Molloy ignores him. The man insists until Molloy becomes suddenly violent, beating the man until he stops moving. Soon afterwards, Molloy makes it out of the woods and Part One abruptly ends.

Part Two is narrated by a private detective by the name of Jacques Moran, who is assigned the task of tracking down Molloy and carrying out specific instructions. The task is given to him by a man named Gaber, who is apparently his supervisor and takes order from a higher boss named Youdi. This narrative (Part Two) begins:

It becomes immediately apparent that Moran is a cruel and arbitrarily abusive father. He sets out on his journey to find Molloy and forces his son Jacques to come with him. They wander across the countryside, increasingly bogged down by the weather, decreasing supplies of food and Moran’s suddenly failing body. He sends his son to purchase a bicycle and while his son is gone, Moran encounters an old man with a large, but light walking stick. Later, Moran is confronted by another man, who he murders in a sudden violent outburst reminiscent of Molloy and hides his body in the forest. After a few days, the son returns with a bicycle and is aghast at his father’s appearance. Immediately, Moran resumes his senseless, violent treatment of his son and the two continue on their journey to Bally. In the outskirts of Bally, they encounter a shepherd with his dog and sheep. For some reason, Moran is transfixed and enchanted. In the morning, Moran wakes to find that his son has fled with the bicycle and most of the money. Moran takes the news with strange warmth and optimism. Moran finishes his provisions and gives up on his journey. He waits for starvation to kill him. Every night, he crawls out of his camp to look at the lights of Bally in the distance and “laughs” strenuously at the sight of it. One night, Moran finds Gaber outside his camp. They have an absurd exchange in which Moran pleads with Gaber to divulge what Youdi said. Gaber disappears quickly thereafter. Moran then embarks on what he understands to be his new assignment, returning home. He limps and drags himself through the countryside through the fall and winter at an excruciatingly slow pace and poses bizarre questions to himself about biblical topics and matters of the church. His ramblings begin to resemble Molloy’s from Part One. During his journey home, he is confronted by an angry farmer who demands to know what he is doing on his land. Feeling that preferred strategy of violence is too risky, Moran makes up a story about doing a pilgrimage and requests a tea to send the farmer away so that he can escape. When Moran finally arrives home, several months later, he laments the death of his bees and hens, which were left out all winter. He settles back into his home and begins to use crutches, like Molloy. Not for the first time, Moran mentions a “voice” that has been gradually speaking to him more and more, and which he claims to understand better now. The novel ends with Moran sitting down to write the report that his boss Youdi, his supervisor Gaber, and the mysterious voice keep demanding he write:

Knowing nothing about Samuel Beckett other than the above summary of his novel Molloy, one would not be surprised to hear he has been described as a contributor to Nonsense Literature and the Theatre of the Absurd. The novel is delightfully absurd. Despite the bizarreness and apparent pointlessness of the story, it is strangely interesting to read. One of its obvious qualities is Beckett’s ability to give each character a distinctive inner voice. You feel like you are inside their head, and the inscrutability of certain passages heightens that experience.

The novel is also very thoughtprovoking to consider in retrospect. There are strong hints that Molloy and Moran are the same person, but it also isn’t clear that they are. Moran never completes his mission of finding Molloy and instead begins to resemble him more and more. For its structure and the enigma at the heart of it, Molloy reminds me of David Lynch’s movie Mulholland Drive. Lynch tells the story of an envious actress who arranges the assassination of her former lover and consequently plunges into deeper despair and intolerable guilt. Lynch represents the irreparable shear that this trauma inflicts on the protagonist’s psyche by telling the story in two realities, a false sublimated one and then the real one.