Malone Dies

Written and published in French in 1951, and in Samuel Beckett’s English translation in 1956, Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ‘the siege in the room’. ´Malone´, writes Malone, ´is what I am called now.´ On his deathbed, whittling away the time with stories and revisions of stories, the octogenarian Malone´s account of his condition is contradictory and intermittent, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of darker rages than his precursor Molloy. Malone promises silence, but as a storyteller he delivers irresistibly more.