Molloy: The Flip Side

ISBN: 1609641124

Author: Tysh, Chris

Condition: New

Molloy: The Flip Side transcreates the first half of Beckett's 1951 French novel, narrated by its eponymous anti-hero who is slowly going nowhere. The hobo lyrics of Tysh's book-length poem open up the unendurable abyss of being, yet zing with vernacular and zany humor: "Gotta check out soon/ Be done with dying," Molloy says, but there's a few things he must do first. And so begins the uncanny journey in this poetic B-side of Beckett's masterpiece. ________________________________________________________________________ Chris Tysh reads in, around, and through Molloy in this ingenious transformation of Becketts French prose into compulsively vernacular English tercets. The narrative echoes in Molloy: The Flip Side make for an unsettling familiarity, spiked with the verbal equivalent of dark chocolate and homemade rum. - Charles Bernstein In Molloy: The Flip Side, Chris Tysh transcreates- rather than translates-the Beckett classic into a Matthew O'Connor-cum-Tiresias rant. "Has a leak in his tank/Button missing a hole/In his wig, you feel me?" The indeterminate narrator of Tysh's formal tercets replicates the dialectics of gender, the Oedipal complex ("The thing is Mother and I - /My shitty start - are so old now/ We're like two sere fucks on a rail") and, more generally, the problem of desire and knowledge vis--vis the world. That's a heady set of balls to keep up in the air, but Tysh's nimble enjambments and seamless heteroglossia (existential angst dukes it out with post-trip-hop surliness) keep things moving, propelling this mock-epic to its jocular, inconclusive, stop. -Tyrone Williams