Book Review: Echo's Bones

Echo's Bones, by Samuel Beckett

I picked up this book because I want to read more traditional Irish literature, and Beckett is nothing if not traditional. (Old joke: The difference between James Joyce and Beckett is that Joyce leaves nothing out of his stories, and Beckett puts nothing in.)

Then I learned this short tale was meant to finish off Beckett's 1934 collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks. I've read that compilation. I think. I do have it in my library, but I can't honestly say I remember anything about it.

Echo's Bones isn't in the collection. The publisher asked for a final story to finish off the group of 10 short stories, to sort of sum them up and top them off.  Beckett submitted Echo's Bones. It was rejected, with the publisher calling it "a nightmare" that will cause readers to flee. "People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won't be too keen on analyzing the shudder."

After reading it. I can see why it wasn't published until 2014.

The story is bewildering. Supposedly, every line in the book is taken from another classic story. I know this because the critic, Mark Nixon, who tries to explain the story, said so. He also left us with 57 pages of annotation -- for a story that is 48 pages long. So there's that. 

Nixon tell us the story has been called bizarre, undisciplined, a struggle. It's a tale of the immediate aftermath of the death of a character in many of the short stories. It's told in three parts, comprising three separate but squished-together tales about Belecqua's afterlife. 

None of this, by the way, makes any sense. It's what Nixon describes in his introduction. I trust he knows more about Beckett than I do. 

Here is one example of the mess that Beckett wrote about Belecqua:

He sighted a submarine of souls on the sea, hove to, casting -- no, drawing up a net. He counted the fish as the Alba, coiled up on the conning tower, sporting the old flamingo, gaffed them and brought them on board, one by one. One hundred and fifty-three iridiscent fish, the sum of the squares of Apostles and Trinity; thrashing and foaming on the gaff. He closed his eyes, intending to have a vision, but felt so marooned when he did so that he opened them again quick. The boat was gone. The significance of this apparition was what he could not fathom. No, nor could anyone else.

It goes on in this vein. It's more like the story of a man who died on an acid trip.