- Mercier and Camier
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Mercier and Camier 
1st edition (French)Author(s) Samuel Beckett Original title 'Mercier et Camier' Translator Samuel Beckett Country France Language French Publisher Les Éditions de Minuit (French); Grove Press (English) Publication date 1970 Published in
English1974 Media type Print, Paperback & Hardcover Pages 123 ISBN 0-8021-3235-9 OCLC Number 1240157 Mercier and Camier is a novel by Samuel Beckett. Written immediately before his celebrated 'trilogy' of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Mercier et Camier (1946, translated in 1974) was Beckett's first attempt at extended prose fiction in French. It features the 'pseudocouple' Mercier and his friend the private investigator Camier, and their repeated attempts to leave a city (a thinly disguised version of Dublin) only to abandon their journey and return. Frequent visits are paid to "Helen's Place", a bawdy house modelled on that of legendary Dublin madam Becky Cooper (much like Becky Cooper, Helen has a talking parrot). A much-changed Watt makes a cameo appearance, bringing his stick down on a pub table and yelling 'Fuck life!'.
Beckett withheld the novel from publication until 1970. The English translation that followed in 1974 featured substantial alterations and deletions from the original text.
External links
- Keith Ridgway on Mercier and Camier The Guardian 19 July 2003
The prose of Samuel Beckett Novels: Dream of Fair to Middling Women • Mercier and Camier • Murphy • Watt • Molloy • Malone Dies • The Unnamable • How It IsShort stories: “Assumption” • “Sedendo et Quiescendo” • “Text” • “A Case in a Thousand” • “First Love” • “The Expelled” • “The Calmative” • “The End” • “Texts for Nothing” • “From an Abandoned Work” • “The Image” • “All Strange Away” • “Imagination Dead Imagine” • “Enough” • “Ping” • “Lessness” • “The Lost Ones” • “Fizzles” • “Heard in the Dark 1” • “Heard in the Dark 2” • “One Evening” • “As the story was told” • “The Cliff” • “neither” • “Stirrings Still” • “Company” • “Ill Seen Ill Said” • “Worstward Ho”
Short story collections: More Pricks Than Kicks • Stories and Texts for Nothing • The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989
Non-fiction: Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam) • Disjecta • Proust • "The Capital of the Ruins"
Categories:- 1946 novels
- Novels by Samuel Beckett
- Novels set in Dublin
- 1970 novels
- 1940s novel stubs
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