A new Beckett? Yasmin Zaher’s ‘The Coin’ and dispossession

Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024) was praised by the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize jury for ‘dissect[ing] nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging in a vivid exploration of identity and heritage’.¹

It was the jury’s unanimous choice.

In its depiction of the narrator’s life in New York, the city and the dream of America become difficult-to-live realities.

She stuffs her life with things. There’s never a mention of her clothes without also a list of their expensive brands:

The coats and jackets: one Max Mara blazer, one Dolce & Gabbana floor-length wool coat for December to February, one Burberry trench coat[. …]

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to look consistently chic and expensive.²

These clothes confer esteem (as the narrator sees it) on herself. She feels better for being perceived in this way.

The same is true for all her possessions, none more so than her Birkin bag. For the narrator, this is an object that ‘others wanted to possess, [and] I was a woman that others wanted to embody’ (Zaher, p. 8).

Like with her clothes, the narrator travels two avenues to pleasure. The first comes from her feeling good in her body. The second comes from the sense of esteem she gets from others.

Capitalism: to critique or celebrate?

Taken together, this feels like a celebration of capitalism, and the way that conspicuous consumption leads to mental health benefits. It also feels like a critique: How shallow is the narrator’s sense of self if capitalism can vampirically infest it so easily?

The celebration of capitalism would seem to be a particularly contemporary response to the world’s ills. It feels like this is only possible in a post-Second World War world, once American capitalism had conquered the world just as wholly as the Allied armies had defeated Nazism.

In that period, Irish writer Samuel Beckett³ was writing about his own vision of the world’s general malaise.

His writing represented a particularly existential view of society, conditioned by an absurdist vision: there really was nothing to the world that had brought pain to millions only a few years before.

In novels like Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (1947–50), and the play Waiting for Godot (1953), Beckett celebrated an absurdist vision of living. Better to laugh quizzically at the tragedy of the world than to respond by buying into its logic.

In a curious way, I think that The Coin echoes that manoeuvre, that attitude to the world.

Possessing dispossession

In Malone Dies, the eponymous protagonists repeatedly lists the objects that he owns. In Happy Days (1961), Winnie likewise lists the objects she uses from her bag before replacing them.

These objects are paraded as if they are the characters’ identities manifested outside the body—just like The Coin‘s narrator.

The novel to succeed Malone Dies is The Unnamable who describes himself at one point as merely the ‘tympanum’, that bit in the ear that registers sound and sends the message to the brain.

This Unnamable is the smallest possible material part of the human body, almost a non-human or non-self. The unnamable is dispossessed of those things that Malone possessed as signs of his self.

The same takes place for Zaher’s narrator. Not only does she rewild her New York apartment, sowing seeds and dumping soil from Central Park on her floor, but she also gradually seeks a reduction of her self to non-self.

Around half-way through the book she wonders ‘what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned’ (Zaher, p. 127), invoking perhaps Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the ‘noble savage’.⁴ But hers is no Enlightenment enquiry; it is entirely bound up with her postmodernist sense of self.

Then towards the end she openly declares: ‘I don’t have a name. I lost it in battle.’ (Zaher, p. 194) This is the zero-point of her (non-)self. This all coincides with a re-appreciation of herself, leading to the provocative announcement that ‘Orgasm is dignity’ (p. 222), which is just another way to say that reducing the clutter in life and returning with vigour to her own body emboldens and energises her.

The ways that both the Unnamable, for instance, and Zaher’s narrator possess their dispossession—even pursuedispossession of the self—opens up an intriguing dialogue.

I doubt either of them would have imagined it possible. I wonder how far and how long the conversation would last.