This volume contains four novellas by Samuel Beckett: "The End", "The Expelled", "The Calmative" and "First Love". In 1977 they were first published by Penguin Books as Four Novellas. Then, in from 1980, Penguin Books published these four novellas as The Expelled, and Other Novellas. This edition, which came out in 2000 with a new introduction, written by Gerry Dukes now bears the title First love, and Other Novellas, but they are still the same, short, four novellas.

Around 2010, Penguin Books also published a series of Penguin Mini. In that volume three novellas were published unde the title The expelled, the same novellas, only "The Calmative was left out". Besides, the mini-series came without introduction and notes.

I bought the mini edition in October 2012, and read it in 2017, unaware that I had already bought the Penguin Modern Classics edition, i.e. this edition, First love, and other novellas, in November 2011. I didn't like the three novellas when I read them in 2017, but decided to reread all of them while reading this edition.

However, I still do not like these novellas. For all the awe expressed in the introduction and the admiration others have for Beckett, I fail to appreciate these stories. I cannot grasp really what they are about or why they are special. ( )

Read these years - decades - ago as a lost student. Loved them, loved them, but can't recall much detail.

( )

4 linked novellas. The Calmative is difficult, the rest more recognisably part of the tradition, & quite hilarious. ( )

The End / The Expelled / The Calmative/ First Love: These four novellas, though their sizes are more like short stories and they read as poetry, were written in 1946. They were originally written in French and later translated into English by the author and Richard Seaver.

My psyche was gripped in a white-knuckled fist and scraped repeatedly against a grater. It amazed me how mere words, carefully selected and arranged on paper, could be so coarse yet sensitive like a cracked scab. That's how I felt while reading this book.

I've read much about Beckett and his dark humor from literary critics. Though I found his prose in these stories like a chisel scraping on my bones and a bone injury is one of the most painful (exception: the small bit of script I've read from his play, Waiting for Godot, did leave me laughing).

Out of the four shorts, I thought The End and First Love stood out the brightest (or darkest in this case).

The End

After reading The End I just didn't feel the same. That short story was disturbing in a refreshingly haunting, feel-good way.

My favorite word orders from The End:

The little boys jeered and threw stones, but their aim was poor, for they only hit me once, on the hat. A policeman stopped us and accused us of disturbing the peace. My friend replied that we were as nature had made us, the boys too were as nature had made them. It was inevitable, under these conditions, that the peace should be disturbed from time to time.

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"And then of course there was the voice of the wind or rather those, so various, of its playthings."

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"As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour. To know I had a being, however faint and false, outside of me, had once had the power to stir my heart.

First Love

Are we truly capable of Love? What is Love? Does it even matter? These are some of the questions Beckett put to me while reading this short story.

Yes, I loved her, it's the name I gave, still give alas, to what I was doing then. I had nothing to go by, having never loved before, but of course had heard of the thing, at home, in school in brothel and at church, and read romances, in prose and verse, under the guidance of my tutor, in six or seven languages, both dead and living, in which it was handled at length.

Why else would he inscribe her name in a pile of cow dung if not for love?

Like in the story The End, the narrator is thrown out of his room where he just wants to wait out the end of his existence quietly, preferably in a room with no furniture, but in any case, away from people... he just wants to be. But then he happens to fall in love. He meets the lady on his bench, the bench he lays on between two dead trees. She asks to sit, he obliges but complains that he can no longer lay straight. She asks him to put his legs across her thighs and then rubs his ankles, and he gets an erection.

Beckett's characters treat their bodily functions as an amusing distraction or intrusion; they defecate, urinate, itch, get erections and allow this to happen with as little effort as possible.

In all four stories, the narrator confesses to urinating or defecating in his pants. In fact in the story The Expelled, the narrator, staggering down the sidewalk, a destitute old man, reflects back to when he was a young boy and what he believes is the cause of his crippling walk: ... and till bedtime I dragged on with burning and stinking between my little thighs, or sticking to my bottom, the result of my incontinence. Whence this wary way of walking, with the legs stiff and wide apart, and this desperate rolling of the bust, no doubt intended to put people off the scent, to make them think I was full of gaiety and high spirits, without a care in the world...

Beckett again strings his carefully selected words in an order that had me scratching uncomfortably as I read through them. I had to read some passages twice and that just got me scratching twice as hard.

While listening to his new love sing he talked about the song that he thought he heard before. I like the way he ended the sentence.

It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, for of all the other songs I have heard in my life, and I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physical impossible short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence has gone on long enough.

And so this review has also gone on long enough… ( )