Watt
by Samuel Beckett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Samuel BeckettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06-16
ISBN: 0802144489
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Watt
Book Review: ''and they say there is no God"
Summary: 4 Stars
Longer than but at a faster pace than "Murphy" if not the prose trilogy that followed, this dismantled novel written during WWII in France by its underground author features less slapstick, more repetition, and lots of nothingness. Produced under stress, "Watt" reveals the ineffable beauty glimpsed amidst the mundane despair and enduring horror of never belonging, never knowing where or why we are here. It's a brisk read, perhaps since there's so much repeated!
Such an element starts to work on you like a mantra, or a dentist's drill's rhythm. It nags at you. Knott's "shadow of purpose" stalks Watt, and those who precede and follow him in serving this man on his surreal estate. There's in this verbose, plangent, picky prose a few glimpses of poignant loveliness mixed with the characteristically wry bitterness: "for here we all seem to end by being good-natured men, and of good will, and indulgent towards the dreams of middle age, which were our dreams, whatever may escape us now and then in the way of bitter and I blush to say even blasphemous words and expressions, and perhaps also because what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so than any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail." (62)
If you see humor as well as heartbreak in this, it's a quick glance, as most of the work carries the increasingly hefty weight of later Beckett drama and prose. You snatch what you can amidst the squalor. "To be together again, after so long, who love the sunny wind, the windy sun, in the sun, in the wind, that is something, perhaps something." (163) Aging draws us away from even these passing comforts towards acknowledgment of their fleeting, spare joys. "To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something." (201)
I found this a tougher time than "Murphy" (also reviewed by me) which by comparison seems rollicking. "Watt" takes us into the circle, the pot, the dog, the Lynch retainers: the familiar upended, tipping us into the existential abyss. It's a heady book, in every sense, for its nonsense reminds us of our tethered mind, trapped in the senses. Out of such circular reasoning, "Watt" begins to make sense, literally. There's such a surfeit of description and rehearsal and routine that the novel deadens from such detail, and in this rigorous mortification it stiffens into a long shout against alienation.
I'm not sure where Arsene's duck came from, I lack the ability to fill in the question marks that break the narrative, and I share the estrangement Knott and Watt both possess, claiming they need little to nothing, but still demanding that Knott "needed to be witnessed" even when "needing nothing if not, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing, of himself knew nothing." (202-3) Out of such knots and whats, the tale tangles itself and you with it. It's up to you to take the challenge, for "Watt" will prepare you for the heights of the prose trilogy, the "dramaticules," and the chilling atmosphere of the later prose pieces as well as the plays.
P.S. Four stars only by comparison with the prose trilogy; there are typos in this Grove printing and lapses in such episodes as Arsene & his duck that add more reader difficulties to the formidably complex narrative! The mass of material that takes a point a further nineteen ways may be amusing, and I know why Beckett does it, but it may deter or dull those wishing a more linear storyline. But, if you're reading Beckett, you already know what to expect rather than a conventional narrative.
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