How It Is: Samuel Beckett

Synopsis:

Published as Comment c’est in French in 1961, and in Beckett’s English in 1964, How It Is divides into three equal parts and is composed throughout in brief unpunctuated paragraphs. These tell of a narrator crawling in darkness, repeating his life as he hears it, obscurely uttered by another voice. The telling is tirelessly explicit about the feelings that pervade this world, but fragmentary and vague about all else.

Together with Molloy, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is counts for many readers as his greatest novel. It is also his most innovative and challenging, both stylistically and for its extreme furthering of the vision of a self in reduced circumstances, inaugurated in his earlier sequence of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable).

Tags:

Categorised as:
Fiction
Sub-categories:
General Fiction
Genres & Themes:
Beckett
Awards & Prizes:
Nobel Prize in Literature - Winner 1969
Belongs to:
Series: Samuel Beckett
How It Is book cover

Selected edition:
Paperback
ISBN:
9780571243747
Published:
05.11.2009
No of pages:
160
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