The Unnamable Audiobook By Samuel Beckett cover art

The Unnamable

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The Unnamable

By: Samuel Beckett
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
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The Unnamable is the third novel in Beckett's trilogy, three remarkable prose works in which men of increasingly debilitating physical circumstances act, ponder, consider, and rage against impermanence and the human condition. The Unnamable is without doubt the most uncompromising text and it is read here in startling fashion by Sean Barrett.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2005 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. (P)2005 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

"Beckett is one of the most positive writers alive. Behind all his mournful blasphemies against man there is real love. And he is genuine: every sentence is written as if it had been lived." (The New York Times Book Review)
Profound Storytelling • Beautiful Writing • Stellar Performance • Literary Experimentation • Perfect Narration
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These books were so full of mad sanity it can be difficult to stay "on the bycycle." Malloy was the easiest for me; he is so hysterically original. But they become more serious as they move along; the characters voices assuming a more bitter maturity. Beckett is a world class poet and I'm out of my depth without larger insights than my own to follow but I loved the adventure and will enjoy listening to them repeatedly for years to come.

Amazing Trilogy

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The dialogue, be it inner or among three minds, it's captivating, best work, great narration

I can't, I must

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The narration is impeccable. Each clause considered and rendered brilliantly. Reverential, at the very least, perhaps even done with love.

Wonderful

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This dramatic monologue is like nothing you can ever imagine or will ever experience again. Sean Barrett gives a stellar performance that is intriguing and absolutely wonderful, incredible, and remarkable while depicting life’s tragedies interspersed with many comical elements. The mixture of delusional insanity fluctuating with moments of lucid sanity will make you question your own sanity in listening to these rambling moments of despair. The narrator’s inner voice makes him wonder, is he really the author of his own thoughts or just a convenient vehicle of how the Silence manipulates him. Did you ever wonder where you thoughts come from or where they disappear to? If you are not steeped in German Idealism and its existential enquiries into the origins of the ego’s transcendental subjectivity, you will find this confusing and nearly impossible to follow, which may be Beckett’s intention. The challenge has been proffered here; how do you make sense out of what seems total, irrational nonsense? Life’s conundrum is in full display. I found this dramatic monologue ingenious and quite entertaining.

The No One Who is Everyone is not You or is It?

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I went on amazing and painful wonderful performance by reader ok five or so more words

The unnameable

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This is the definitive way to experience a book I previously considered unadaptable. Arguably the greatest novel exploration of the raw self, with a fittingly mad yet eerily lucid performance by Barrett.

Best Performance on Audible

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This book is a long and disjointed monologue of some (unnamable) being, trying to determine what it/he really is. He is sometimes waiting to die, sometimes waiting to be born, always struggling with facts, sensations and language itself in the search of himself. Definitely not for everybody, but extremely funny in its way, and well worth the effort in my opinion.

But the narration here is simply astounding. Sean Barrett brings this incredibly difficult, almost inaccessible work to life in a way I never imagined possible. The same also goes for his work on "Molloy" and "Malone Dies", but this book is truly the hardest of the three, and Mr. Barrett reads it perfectly.

Best narration I have ever heard

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I regret not reading the first two books in the trilogy first (Molloy and Malone Dies). This book clearly pushes the limits of what can be said without reference to other people or things. Well, he does talk about other things but the effect is of being isolated outside of time and place; of being stuck without any external stimuli to respond to for all eternity. Hell. Probably. Unless it isn't. But there I go again. Absurdist seems like too frivolous a name for this genre, but I believe that is the usual classification. Whether the two prior books would have made this any more meaningful, they would at least have given a little context for this character. Read on its own, it is so unrelentingly bleak, it makes Waiting for Godot seem like a walk in the park. Back to the limits of what can be said without plot or character, Beckett is the master of this sort of thing. Just when you think there's nothing more to be said, and you're thinking you can't take any more of it, he manages to milk one more topic for his amorphous protagonist to rant about. But he knows when to stop. I can't say I was sorry when it was over, but I can't say I didn't appreciate this strange intellectual exercise either. I think there is a certain appropriateness in listening to this as opposed to reading it on paper. The protagonist is stuck listening to his own thoughts in real time. A similar phenomenon afflicts the brave listener willing to take on this audiobook. Good luck.

The Unstory

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Third in trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Listen to all three in a row. Beckett's finest writing. Sean Barrett's performance is the best I've experienced on audible. Perfect reading of Beckett. What could be better?

Profound story, beautiful Irish voice

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Want to torture your brain? Read forwards, then backwards, paragraph by paragraph, or sentence, or ?¿

Perfect Abstraction

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