Molloy

"Molloy , like Death on the Installment Plan but in an even more extreme fashion, immerses the reader in the narrator’s consciousness. Like its predecessor, this book is just very, very funny. Perhaps its most famous episode is the several pages in which Molly describes in painstaking detail how he arranges his “sucking stones” in his mouth. It’s impossible to convey the magic of this scene through summary or paraphrase. The critic Wolfgang Iser pointed out the great, dynamic paradox of the novel. On the one hand, the world it describes—a confusing and confused reality confronted by a character who suffers from multiple and often nameless disabilities—is incredibly bleak. But on the other hand, each sentence manifests a creative energy and intensity that reveals life at its fullest and richest. What should reduce one to tears, or to stoicism , instead convulses one with laughter—an extreme excitation of the organism. Molloy shows how modernism makes something out of nothing. And I mean that in a spiritual sense—the book causes us to feel awe and terror at the emergence of form out of emptiness."