Start with Waiting for Godot. The obvious alternative is the trilogy of novels, which is what people mean when they call Beckett a major prose writer, and it is the wrong first move by a wide margin. Waiting for Godot takes ninety minutes, it is genuinely funny — vaudeville funny, hats and boots and bad jokes — and it establishes everything Beckett spent the rest of his life refining: two figures, nothing happening, language filling the gap. Read it, then watch a production if you can, because it was written to be heard.
Endgame and Act Without Words is the immediate second stop, and Beckett himself thought Endgame and Act Without Words the better play. It is bleaker, tighter, and the comedy has turned cruel. If Godot showed you the shape, Endgame shows you what the shape is for. Two plays and you have a real sense of the writer, at a cost of about four hours.
The novels: start with Murphy, not Molloy
Beckett's fiction runs in a straight line from conventional to nearly unreadable, and the order to read it is the order he wrote it. Murphy, from 1938, is a comic novel with a plot, characters and jokes about chess — recognisably a young Irishman who had read too much Joyce and was working out how to stop. It is the friendliest thing he wrote in prose.
Watt is the transition, and it is where the first readers fall away. Written while Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo in southern France, it is obsessively repetitive by design: lists, permutations, the same event described in every possible order. Some readers find it hypnotic and very funny. Others find it a wall. It is legitimate to skim it, and it is legitimate to skip it entirely and lose nothing needed for what follows.
The trilogy, and a catalogue quirk
The three novels Beckett wrote in French between 1947 and 1950 are the centre of his prose achievement, and our catalogue holds them in two forms. There is a standalone record for Molloy, and there is a combined volume, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, holding all three. Malone Dies and The Unnamable have no standalone records here, so if you want the second and third novels, the combined volume is the way to get them.
That is not a bad outcome, because they should be read together anyway. Molloy is the most accessible — two narratives, a wandering derelict and the detective sent after him, and enough story to hold onto. Malone Dies removes most of the story. The Unnamable removes the body, the setting and eventually the speaker, and ends with the most quoted sentence in modern literature about being unable to go on and going on.
Be warned plainly: The Unnamable defeats a large proportion of the people who attempt it. It is a hundred-odd pages of unbroken voice with almost no paragraph breaks in the closing stretch. Reading it in short sittings, aloud, works far better than reading it as a novel. Stopping partway is not a failure of nerve; it is a common and reasonable response to a book designed to exhaust its own premise.
The late work
After the trilogy Beckett got shorter rather than easier. Krapp's last tape is a thirty-minute play for one actor and a tape recorder, and it is the most emotionally direct thing he wrote — the single best argument against the idea that he was a cold writer. Company, from 1980, is the finest of the late prose: a voice in the dark addressing a man lying in the dark, forty pages, and unexpectedly tender.
Where to stop
A complete Beckett for most readers is four items: Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Act Without Words, Molloy and Krapp's last tape. Add Company if the late work appeals; add the full trilogy only if Molloy left you wanting more of that voice rather than relieved it had ended.
James Knowlson's authorised biography Damned to fame is the standard life. For where Beckett came from, the obvious path is James Joyce, whose assistant he briefly was and whose method of addition he spent a career reversing.
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