Reader's Diary #2295 - Samuel Beckett: Dante and the Lobster

It's a bit, maybe intentionally so, difficult to first get into Samuel Beckett's "Dante and the Lobster." It opens with a man named Belacqua struggling to understand a passage of Dante's Inferno. As it moves from there, I too had had some difficulty with the language as it was very local, dated, and like Belacqua himself, a bit on the pretentious side.

After finally getting into the style, the story sadly didn't amount to much. Basically he prepares a meal for his aunt who is also his Italian teacher. He's mortified however to learn that lobsters are boiled alive. It seems like a odd, non-important conclusion to me. But Belacqua at least was interesting, reminding me at times of Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces.