Word: beckettian
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Martel writes with a smooth, almost stoned detachment, cool to the touch, which gives a distant, unreal feeling to a story that's already dangerously weird and abstract. The taxidermist's play turns out to be a Beckettian affair about a monkey and a donkey, Beatrice and Virgil, who live on a giant shirt (yes, a shirt). Beatrice and Virgil are lost, shell-shocked survivors of a massacre of animals by humans, an "abomination" they can refer to only as "the Horrors." Thus the Holocaust, denied entrance at the front door, sneaks in through the window...
...come back, in whatever form, I will be there. Because far more exciting than a goal being scored is the possibility of one. And no sport can represent the beauty of hope as well as staying awake for a goal to end a triple-overtime playoff game. By stressing Beckettian optimism, the sport has uniquely trained us to sit through a lockout. Anyway, we have no choice. You feel a little too special when you tell people you?re a curling...
...even stripped-down Wallace is epic modernism: big plots, absurd Beckettian humor and science-fiction-height ideas portrayed vis-a-vis slow, realistic stream of consciousness. In an effort to make his often bizarre endings more powerful, Wallace frequently stops stories before their climax, which sometimes improves them and sometimes makes them seem like an aborted attempt at a novel. When it works, it's part of his Pynchonesque trick of keeping the reader uncomfortable by withholding information and embedding the most devastating facts within long descriptive paragraphs...
...deadline approaches, a thesis writer finds that every aspect of life begins to resemble his or her topic in a kooky, freakish way. No more strawberry yogurt in the dining hall. Interesting, yes, the empty metal canister seems to recall the all-too-familiar Beckettian void created by the obligation to speak and the ironic knowledge that one has nothing to say. I’ll have to footnote that. I never thought that 40–60 pages of text about English literature could so completely distract me from the real world. The Olympics went by (or are going...
...into the ground, but "Who's on First?" is not only the century's most famous comedy bit; it's also the best. It's absurdism mixed with the easy pleasure of confusion, and Bud Abbott plays the perfect cool logician to Lou Costello's frustrated inquisitor in this Beckettian farce. RUNNERS-UP "Dead Parrot," Monty Python; "Rope Tricks," Will Rogers...