Echo's Bones by Samuel Beckett – digested read

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/27/echos-bones-samuel-beckett-digested-read

Version 0 of 1.

The dead die hard, they must take it as they find it, and Belacqua, having believed that his natural troubles were over now that he was dead, found that he was obliged to revisit them in his afterlife because some idiot publisher had demanded that Beckett knock out an extra short story to pad out More Pricks Than Kicks.

So it was that Belacqua found himself sitting like a casse-poitrine – that's ready to suck himself off, to you and me – on his gravestone, picking his nose, smoking cigars and waiting to go through the tedious effort of living again in order that he might once more die. As he scratched his arse, Belacqua was once more overwhelmed with the inevitable futility of his existence. This shabby fagpiece, this dreary triptych would be omitted from the book and he would have gone through the pointless bother of breathing once more for no reason.

"My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked, all the old pains and aches of me soul-junk return," he thought. As you do. Just then he saw a woman standing near a dead Galloway cow, aching to hug him with her pullulant holy hands.

"They call me Zaborovna the Scabby Prostitute," she simpered. "Pray eat of some garlic and drink of some Cuban rum."

"Though you hedge, Miss Privet," Belacqua replied, "yet do Yew Box?"

"Did you see the Parambimbi, after the manner of Ninus the Assyrian."

"I'm sorry," he said. "You've completely lost me now. I've no idea what's going on."

"If you bother to read the 70 pages of footnotes that follow the 48 pages of this story, you will learn that I have just raped you."

"Oh goody. Am I dead again yet?"

"No."

"Bugger."

"Avast there, my friend," said another wearish voice behind him. Belacqua turned round to see a bald colossus with a cloak of gutta percha streaming from the barrel of his bust and brandishing a golf putter.

"And who are you?" Belacqua asked.

"I am Lord Gall of Wormwood. And I shall call you Adeodatus."

"Then state your business for I am beginning to feel as bruised in spirit as Richilda, relict of Albert, Duke of Ebersberg."

"Wow," said Lord Gall. "I had no idea you were that bruised in spirit. In which case I will keep it brief. My wife is a fruitful earth, yet I am no pripaean Baron Extravas and I require a son."

Belacqua turned green as Circe's honey, which is very green in a slightly yellowish-green sort of way as he was later to learn. "So, you aspermatic puddle of iniquity. You want me to have a petite mort for you. You ask a lot. I've got to say I'm sick to death of petites morts. I've been dying, if you will forgive the expression, for just one grande mort, but even my grande mort turned out to be not so bloody grande."

But Belacqua obliged anyway, leaving Lady Moll in a clitoridian croon and with a baby daughter. So it goes in the world.

To proceed to the final classico-romantic scene. Belacqua sat on his grave and watched a man approach with a spade. In a previous story this man had had no name, but now he must be given one, so we shall call him Doyle. Belacqua was pleased to see him.

"When you dig me up, you shall find my coffin empty," he said as a submarine bobbed up and down. "My whole life has been a derogation of my responsibilities to my fatal foetus."

"If you say so. But please don't go on and on about Dante, Goethe and Ovid," Doyle groaned. "I'm having a bad enough day as it is without you moaning about the grey flaws of tramontane."

The spade split open the coffin lid to reveal a pile of stones. The submarine departed, very cross indeed, while Belacqua remained petrified. At the very least, he thought to himself, if I have yet to achieve the banality finality of death for which I have so long yearned, I must content myself with the knowledge that I have now completely died on the page. So it goes in the world.

Digested read, digested: Nil sperandum.