Molloy the Flip Side by Chris Tysh

Molloy: The Flip Side transcreates the first half of Beckett’s 1951 French novel, narrated by its eponymous anti-hero who is slowly going nowhere. The hobo lyrics of Tysh’s book-length poem open up the unendurable abyss of being, yet zing with vernacular and zany humor: “”Gotta check out soon/ Be done with dying,”” Molloy says, but there’s a few things he must do first. And so begins the uncanny journey in this poetic B-side of Beckett’s masterpiece.

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Chris Tysh reads in, around, and through Molloy in this ingenious transformation of Beckett’s French prose into compulsively vernacular English tercets. The narrative echoes in Molloy: The Flip Side make for an unsettling familiarity, spiked with the verbal equivalent of dark chocolate and homemade rum.

— Charles Bernstein

In Molloy: The Flip Side, Chris Tysh transcreates— rather than translates—the Beckett classic into a Matthew O’Connor-cum-Tiresias rant. “”Has a leak in his tank/Button missing a hole/In his wig, you feel me?”” The indeterminate narrator of Tysh’s formal tercets replicates the dialectics of gender, the Oedipal complex (“”The thing is Mother and I — /My shitty start — are so old now/ We’re like two sere fucks on a rail””) and, more generally, the problem of desire and knowledge vis-à-vis the world. That’s a heady set of balls to keep up in the air, but Tysh’s nimble enjambments and seamless heteroglossia (existential angst dukes it out with post-trip-hop surliness) keep things moving, propelling this mock-epic to its jocular, inconclusive, stop.

—Tyrone Williams

Chris Tysh is the author of several collections of poetry and drama, including, most recently, Night Scales: A Fable For Klara K. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Kresge Foundation, she lives in Detroit and teaches at Wayne State University. Molloy: The Flip Side is the first volume of her three-part project, Hotel des Archives, inspired by French novels of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 110 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-112-2

$16

Molloy- The Flip Side Book … by BlazeVOX [books]