How It Is

by Samuel Beckett

Book Overview

"It is one thing to be informed by Shakespeare that life "is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing"; it is something else to encounter the idea literally presented in a novel by Samuel Beckett.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802150667
• ISBN13: 9780802150660
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 147 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Essential!

This is final statement about the meaning of life in the 20/21 st centuries: I can't go on; I must go on; I can't go on; I'll go on. You must deal with this, and you can't live without it.

Modern Epic Poetry

_How It Is_ is another challenging, far-out epic by Samuel Beckett. Beckett pushes the far outer boundaries of what can be accomplished through literary fiction. _How It Is_ brings us to the most remote frontiers of artistic consciousness, pioneering new ground into the furthest reaches of the human mind. Join us for this epic voyage into the mind of a profoundly disturbed genius.

Whither the well-wrought novel?

Beckett mastered standing on both sides of the borderline between convention and experiment. How It Is, both immediate in poignancy and resistant to a straight-forward reading, is wonderful testimony to this incredible ability. What is most wonderful about How It Is, and Beckett's late prose works in general, is how the form of the works speak just as loudly as the meanings of the words, if not louder. If anyone is heralding the death of the well-wrought novel, Beckett has demonstrated a controversal but brilliant way forward. We might baulk at its strangeness, but Beckett's is a very generous strangeness, one that requires work on the reader's part but will give the reader a unique experience of what a literary work can do.

"warmth of primeval mud impenetrable dark"

Imagine. Wallowing, hoping, despairing, sinking, dreaming... then a phrase:"the air thrills with the hum of insects"More mud. Grovelling, twisting, stumbling, crying... then another:"I listen a good moment they are good moments"Somehow the mud doesn't seem so dirty, the darkness doesn't seem so bleak. For there is lustre even in the mud. Such is the beauty of Beckett. and is there not infinite wisdom in the following?there are moments they are good moments.

nutshell inferno

Down and Out in the Primordial Mud. A perfect poem about cyclic hopeless doom. But you had better be in the mood for it.