Huh. ( )

Hair-tonic salesman Aly Berg, alias Greb, comes to a South Coast resort in the depths of winter to murder the father who abandoned him and his mother twenty-eight years earlier. The result is a strange, dark farce, obviously strongly inspired by Beckett, but with more than a hint of the Tony Hancock/Monty Python tradition (making copious use of props like a ventriloquist's dummy and a number of dead pets). There's so much confusion with the dummy that we — and Berg — lose track of whether the father is actually dead yet or whether it's the dummy that Berg has murdered yet again; when the actual murder does take place, it hardly seems significant any more.

Berg/Greb is clearly deep in Oedipus country, attracted to his father's repulsive girlfriend Judy and in love with his possessive offstage mother, but there's also a bizarre episode where he dresses up in Judy's clothes for no obvious reason and his father tries to make love to him, and various same-sex episodes hinted at in his past.

All very odd, but with a bouncy kind of energy that doesn't feel Beckettish at all, and full of unexpected language.
A good argument for not visiting Brighton (or wherever it is), perhaps, but also a good argument for reading more Quin. ( )

A stream of consciousness decades after the death of JJ and VW and Nightwood and so on (though Sarraute was rather fresh) can hardly be called experimental writing, but the kind of farce of it not taking itself too seriously can. Top-notch modernism, slim and frisky. ( )