I bought this (at a sale) back in 2009 along with either Malone Dies or Molloy. I read the other book at the time, but not this one.
I’m really culturemaxxing here — this edition was translated by Norway’s foremost poet, Jan Erik Vold, in the late 60s. And it flows really well; I wasn’t tempted for a second to seek out the English version of this. (Which was translated by Beckett himself from the original French.)
About 20 pages in, we drop paragraph markers, and the pages become Wall Of Text. But this isn’t hard hard to read — we’re not talking Lucy Church Amiably by Gertrude Stein here. There’s even a sort of narrative going on for the first half of the book.
My strategy for reading “difficult” books is to say to myself that I’m reading 20 pages in one sitting, no matter what. No breaks; no diversions; no “just look something up”, because I know that it can be hard to get back to a book like this if I’ve found something else to amuse me. (While I’m reading most novels, I don’t care — I read in a scatter-brained way when I’m reading prose, but when I’m reading comics or Difficult Books, I’m laser focused. For a period of time.)
So it took me more than a week to read this, 20 pages per day, more or less.
Towards the end, it becomes more dense — we get sentences going on for pages at a time.
It’s a pretty spiffy book. I’m guessing many people quote the final bit of the book — “if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — because they didn’t read the rest, but they should. It’s all good.
L’Innommable (1953) by Samuel Beckett (buy used, 4.0 on Goodreads)