Samuel Beckett"s brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp"s Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he"s unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett"s instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce"s delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence,...