This is a novel that's my on my radar for a couple of months, since it made David Benioff's (of
Game of Thrones fame) Top-Ten list in a New York Times article. Several other books on the list were favorites of mine, so clearly I needed to pay attention to the rest. This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list.
I'm going to nominate the first novel by Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize in Literature winner,
Murphy. I've clipped a few quotes from the Guardian article:
Quote:
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.
Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.
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Quote:
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Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness.
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