Book description
Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett
was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett
acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in
the series' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy,
Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in
crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their
distrust of the rational universe. Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's
servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is
to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being,
and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign
him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously
appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and
minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected
text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history.
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at
Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated
in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and
followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote
one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't
published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett
international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in
the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1961. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the
theatre until his death in 1989.
