Watt [Paperback]

For the first time in Faber editions, a newly edited and corrected text of this classic novel --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Fiction. WATT was the beginning of Samuel Becket's post-war literary career, the fruition of the years in hiding in the Vaucluse mountains from the Gestapo, which also largely inspired WAITING FOR GODOT. But it remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish, a philosophical novel full of the grim humour that was already his trade-mark in such earlier fictions as MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS and MURPHY. The perambulations of WATT, especially in the home of the eccentric Mr. Knott, and the sketching of logic to elicit meaning, must be among the most comic inventions of modern literature. First published by the libertine Olympia Press in 1953 it has established itself as one of the most quoted and best-loved of Becket's novels. The typographical oddities and omissions are as Beckett left the text.

Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906 and died
in Paris in 1989. After school in Northern Ireland he went to Trinity
College in Dublin where he distinguished himself in French and Italian and
was recognised as a brilliant scholar, who under an exchange arrangement
taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure before becoming a writer. He left
Ireland and finally settled in Paris, staying in France during the war
where he was a courier in the Résistance. He won the Nobel Prize in 1969
and is now recognised as one of the major writers of the 20th century.