Only tangentially related to the article, but: if you haven't read any Beckett, you owe it to yourself to check out at least Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two relatively short plays that alternate nicely between black comedy and surreal despair.
And if you can't tell what it's all about or make sense of what's said, then wait until you feel such despair yourself (after a loss, because of depression, betrayal, existentual anxiety, loss of faith, etc., and try again).
In college, when I had finished reading Murphy I could hardly get out of my chair and leave the apartment to go to class to discuss it.
Muscle atrophy? ;)
Agreed. Though I would recommend that anyone attempting to read "Waiting for Godot" first start by reading about the philosophy of the absurd, and early 20th-century artistic movements like Dada and surrealism. Those are the very basic keys you need to understand the work of Beckett, that is work that remains opaque to the viewer/reader unless they do some groundwork.
Oh man, I watched Waiting for Godot on Youtube, and it was tough to get through.