Customer Reviews

Watt (Evergreen Original E-152)

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"Watt" is the hilarious story of an itinerant character who walks one day from a train station, like a homing pigeon, straight to the home of a man whom he will serve. He enters the kitchen to take his spot, whereupon the present kitchen worker issues a rambling monologue of stunning length and baffling content, then leaves the household for Watt to stay behind. In the first few pages, we are already asking: Why did Watt just show up? Whose house is this? Who is this man in the kitchen already? Why is he delivering this major dissertation? What does it all mean?

The rest of the book concerns Watt's service to the master of the house, some of it conventionally narrated, much of it digressive and odd. To explain this book, however, is to sound ridiculous. A certain number of things happen to Watt, he takes a certain number of actions, he engages in a certain number of conversations, and he ends the story in the book in a certain meaningful fashion. The entire story is told in Beckett's trademark effusive style, a rollicking, bizzare, but highly entertaining profusion.

The meaning of the book is also classic Beckett: Don't wait for Higher Meaning, because there is none. All his books portray absurd characters doing absurd things, waiting for life to reveal itself, but ultimately realizing that life reveals itself through the living. To answer the questions posed above, the book is compsed like a circle, just like life. At the same time, it's also completely meaningless, just like life. We go to some place, we stand in some position, we engage with some people, we commit some acts, we turn and commit other acts, and we engage with some other people. Somehow, among all this ballet, the world still turns, and we still live upon it. For all their foolish sounding, Beckett's books do indeed have a meaning, that life is just the living of it.

Beckett is a psychological master. His prose style will never be repeated. I'd call him the Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan of literature, a crude analogy, for which we should apologize, but it is one that we hope reflects the major impact of his work on the art, and his primacy among its literary practitioners.

Beckett's work is random by no means. It is carefully crafted, and has an internal rhythm all its own. If a reader is willing to take off their shoes and run through the squishy mud of Beckett's life-swamp, so to speak, it is a joy to read and great fun to reflect upon. "Watt" is a good example of his work, relatively short, and relatively simple, but still likely to provoke great consternation among any who are not used to Beckett's gushing and admirable style, but great enjoyment among those who take it on its own life-affirming terms.

Beckett is a great writer for those readers who seek a literary puzzle, a semantic challenge, and a story with a surreal whiff, which tells us how wonderful it is just to be alive, enjoying our time on earth. "Watt" is one of Beckett's more accessible and fun works.

I can't go along with this being one Beckett's more difficult novels, or for completists only, and not just because it's my personal all-time fave rave. From a biographical point of view, Watt marks the point where Beckett pretty much threw off the influence of Joyce, but before he self-consciously turned himself into the anti-Joyce. This brief state of affairs resulted in a fantastic, hilarious book that has everything - semi-vigorous ambulating, crack-up dialogue and rock-throwing action! This is Beckett's funniest work, and also contains some of his best discriptions and most memorable speeches (particularly Arsene's monologue), and is one of the easiest to read (allowing that Dream/More Pricks and Murphy are a tad insufferable, and thus a bit of a slog).

The impression that Wattis difficult may stem from the idea that there is some enlightenment within the text that the hapless reader is obliged to decode, deconstruct or otherwise deduce, but the book is more likely a dramatization, and an inflicting, of confusion. If this is found acceptable, the book is an intense pleasure to read and just maybe exceeds the Three Novels in this aspect.

This book is a joy! Beckett's wonderful English prose, his humanity and sense of humor, shine forth on every page. After forty years and many rereadings, it has only grown on me--the jokes still amuse, the writing is still glorious, the message still enigmatic and profound. This is one of those seminal books that sustain and hearten you, that reawaken your love for suffering humanity. There's no one like Beckett, and nothing (except the trilogy) like "Watt". Buy it. Verbum sat.

This novel is SO funny! I know it's an avant-garde masterpiece and all, but it's also hilarious. I guess if we read it straight, we would have to conclude that the protagonist, Watt, is schizophrenic, along with the narrator also, probably. The characters are not realistic. Plot actions seem completely random and unmotivated. Watt's characteristic action is to consider every possibility in every situation, and every possible combination of possibilities. There's one part that had me laughing out loud. Watt is some kind of minor servant in a household, and his orders are to feed the leftovers to the dog. But there is no dog! So Watt dreams up all these far-fetched and absurd schemes for finding a dog to feed the leftovers to. I couldn't stop laughing, but my friends say I have a weird sense of humor.

"Watt" is probably the most difficult text of Beckett's to get through-the apparent banality of plot and theme, the confusion of voice and later of language(by Watt at least, if not the reader), the rhythmic yet maddening combinatory inventories of personal posessions (a hallmark of "Molloy" in the trilogy to come) that comprises much of the dense often paragraphless prose, the fundamental personality-lessness of the titualar character, the novels appendix that hints at what might have been included but was not(except, of course, as an appendix, which ultimately includes it), all make the experience of Watt at times incredibly trying to get through. But it has beautiful, wise, and enigmatic passages enough to goad continued reading. Written while Beckett was active in the French Resistance during WWII, often while in hiding or on the run and always at night, the peculiarly drawn out trivialities of the life of the servant Watt become zen reflections on a life that cannot be lived with introspection, for that might yield the madness that is for this reader suggested by the seeming (if shadowy and vague) incarceration of Watt and Sam the narrator. Beckett is often accused of being too negative in his art, of aligning himself with the dread of the existentialists who shared his experience and context in midcentury France. I find that Beckett's dread is not some heroic answer to a banal and futile existence, but the only honest response one can have to an acknowledgement of "existence-in-itself"(whatever that means):to record a life of unknowing, to fail to represent it faithfully, to record the tension between the necessity of the record and its failure to be faithfully displayed, all with the "mirthless laugh...,the saluting of the highest joke,...the laugh that laughs--silence please--at that which is unhappy"(Watt,p.48). Desparate expression, with only the will to laugh, if lacking the joke.

In this novel, and in others, Mr.Samuel Beckett has succeeded (where psychologists and neurologists and neurotics have failed) in illuminating the workings of his own mind and, in so doing, the minds of others (roughly speaking, roughly speaking). The glossy coverings of plot and character, of authority and certainty, have been unscrewed and tossed aside, leaving naked and exposed more primitive and ancient mechanisms (and seeing virtually anybody nude, in certain lights and from certain angles, can be very funny, and so it is here). What is more, the words unfix themselves from their accustomed roles, their unargued meanings, and so become free to associate amongst themselves. I don't know, I'm not sure how to encourage a hesitant reader to buy this book...a quote: 'But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such titbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds' eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouser-legs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.' Part III, paragraphs 15&16.

To a house in the country comes an enigmatic man named Watt to take the place of an outgoing servant in the household staff of a man equally enigmatic, Mr. Knott. From this commonplace beginning, Samuel Beckett weaves a most uncommon tale that can perhaps only be accurately described as...well, Beckettian.

Watt is of that distinctive tribe of shabby, decrepit, stumblebums who are regularly featured as "heroes" of Beckett's work. In the case of the present novel, Watt becomes obsessively preoccupied with the habits, duties, and peccadilloes of the other household staff and, in particular, of his erstwhile new employer, the aforementioned, Mr. Knott. Clever how Beckett has Watt--a cipher himself--trying to decipher another cipher, Mr. Knott. To Watt, his employer, who he eventually comes to dress and undress, remains an elusive albeit binding mystery. But then virtually everything presents itself as a mystery to Watt and becomes the subject of long, tortured, and mostly humorous super-logical speculations that seek to take every possible explanation into account for even the most mundane phenomenon--with invariably absurd results. What you have is the literary equivalent of the old proverb of the spider who asked the centipede how it manages to walk with all those legs--and the centipede trying to explain suddenly finds he can't take another step without falling. The same sort of paralysis grips Watt's efforts to understand Mr. Knott and, for that matter, the absurdity of life in general. It's an affliction very common to characters in Samuel Beckett's work--and probably one that strikes a sympathetic chord in the experience of his most appreciative readers.

Indeed, significant portions of *Watt* will likely try the patience of lesser fans comprised as these portions are of quasi-Biblical lists of absurd comprehensiveness, extended series of repetitions detailing, for instance, all the possible permutations a man might manage when shodding his feet with the customary footwear available to him each morning: a shoe, a boot, a sock, and a slipper. Like a lot of Beckett, these kinds of ridiculously exhaustive lists of minutiae gather a certain sort of power and poetry when read aloud, but they are nearly impossible to get through with any profit while reading silently on a crowded bus, let's say.

On the other hand, *Watt,* like *Mercier and Camier* is quite a bit more conventional than Beckett's later fiction; though, of course, "conventional" in regard to Beckett is a relative term. In this case, *Watt* features genuine dialogue, a range of character viewpoints, and, if not a plot in the ordinary sense, than a plot in the extraordinary sense.

Mordant, ribald, dark, and grotesque, not to mention slapstick, sometime Three Stooges-like funny, *Watt* may not be Beckett at his peak, but he's clearly on his way--and Beckett anywhere on the climb is head and shoulders above just about anyone else.

Well first of all there's this:

"For when on Sam the sun shone bright, then in a vacuum panted Watt, and when Watt like a leaf was tossed, then stumbled Sam in the deepest night. But ah, when exceptionally the desired degrees of ventilation and radiance were united, in the little garden, then were we peers in peace, each in his own way, until the wind fell, the sun declined."

Sam and Watt strolling in their respective weathers because at this point in Part III Watt has just been removed from Sam's pavilion and the little garden of before now had borders, in the form of fences, fencing off, as far as Sam could see, the little gardens of other pavilions. The poor unfortunate inmates of Saint John of Gods in Dublin, or, more colloquially, the Johnny Goddams. I cycled three or four times around its grounds in the 80s and stopped once and smoked a smoke standing up under a stand of pines. Not too shabby I thought. Getting back to the present though I tried inputting the paragraph about Watt's reflections on Mr Knott's apparent want of a house-dog and Amazon inexplicably failed to print this so I altered one or two of what I took to be the offending words: crotch and loins to be exact. But still Amazon baulked. It's funny but I do believe the exiled Foxrockian himself was forever having trouble in the English langauge in the form of edicts of excision signed by none other than the Lord Chamberpot himself, Sir Bertram Overlunch or some such I shouldn't wonder. Talk about straining at stool. But be that baulk as it may let me urge in any case the following: 1. Watt's a right old larf for those who ceaselessly harken to the perpetual permutations of a particular type of prose fiction--plotless to all intents and purposes, the end hardly the issue, the telling words used to tell, the sheer variety of trousers and so forth--and 2. Jimmy Luntz from the hilariously lean and mean Nobody Move by the ever reliable Denis Johnson which I just so happened to pick up again while I was halfway through Watt is a curiously maligned but memorable character and the four-parter itself as a matter of fiction is the niftiest little noir tailor made for those lucky bleeders who'd already dug the dude's magisterial Already Dead, to say nothing of the incandescent short stories or Angels or especially Resuscitation of Hanged Man. Here is Luntz more or less pleading for his limbs in Ernest Gambol's Cadillac:

Jimmy Luntz: "Give me a chance, my friend. A chance to work my magic."

Ernest Gambol: "You're working it now. It ain't working."

Watt's been here thank Christ since well before paragraphs of his fanschmabulously funny adventures could be printed for people to admire and chuckle over online. But that's not the thing, this here's the thing: read slowly the devastatingly funny pages about the Lynch family and its travails towards a personal millennium in Watt and fail to laugh I double bleeding dare you. When I read these pages myself on the A train I had to stand up and get off early, at Columbus Circle if you must know, to laugh properly with appropriate abandon. Watt is a novel of the most exceptional pages. Written by all accounts during an oddly protracted time in a place where nothing and everything seemed to be occurring almost simultaneously, that is in the south of France between 1943 and 1945. Passed the time you might like to think and so Sam said and indeed by rights the book is written in exactly the way it is because of the way things were. Watt more or less doesn't even conclude convincingly which is probably just as well, for Watt. The passage concerning the learned university committee of five fine men adjudicating the results of the student Earnest Louit's college sponsored endeavours in the Burren, involving the stupendous mathematical cerebration of one Mr Nackybal, cube and root et cetera, is a sustained blow upon the funny bone. To say nothing of Sam's shock when he first heard Watt utter his words back to front in John of Gods: "No it is, yes, replied Watt. This short phrase caused me, I believe, more alarm, more pain, than if I had received, unexpectedly, at close quarters, a charge of small shot in the ravine." Jimmy Luntz though in Johnson's canny caper just recently blew into town and get this: Jimmy's thumb hurt like a bleeding horse radish after he fired that other weapon in the dark falling down the outside stairs of the tavern on the Feather River. He let the damaged digit hang out of the window while he drove and I was right up there all along coz I cannot hardly stand when a bone of any kind gets threatened or maltreated in a book I'm reading. Forget movies altogether too in this regard--makes my hair stand right up in my scrunchy so it does. The flaw in the ointment so sue me already. So Jimmy Luntz had him a sharp pain in his shooting thumb and after sucking it for a minute or two abruptly stuck it out into the wind while he drove around in Sally's Eff's truck which as far as I can remember he then banged eventually into a fence post looking for smokes which turned out to be in his shirt pocket the whole time.

I guess in the end it comes down to this: Watt's the gent for those discerning few whose reading does not necessarily anticipate the actual full stop and Luntz is overwhelmingly the short sharp relish of readers every which way but Osbert Sitwell.

"Watt" is my favorite Beckett novel for a number of reasons: it's funnier than the Trilogy and better constructed (not to mention more original) than Murphy; unlike e.g. "Malone Dies" it doesn't feature a self-pitying deadbeat that you frequently wish would shut up and stop whining; and Arsene's long speech is one of the purplest passages in all of Beckett. The novel consists of four parts, which (as he explains at the beginning of part IV -- I guess this is a spoiler, to the extent that it makes sense to talk of spoilers in a Beckett novel) are "naturally" arranged in the chronological order 2, 1, 4, 3. The outer frame (the opening and closing parts) is Joycean realism -- these parts take place in well-defined locations, a tram stop and a train station, and contain a fairly rich cast of characters. The inner sections are full-blown Beckett, deranged and solipsistic: 2 takes place in Mr Knott's strange establishment, where Watt, inexplicably, becomes a manservant; 3 in what appears to be an asylum -- though much of it consists of the second half of Watt's time at Mr Knott's, which in turn consists largely of an irrelevant story the other manservant told the gardener about a rustic who can allegedly do cube roots in his head.

The centrality of irrelevances and non sequiturs to Beckett's style makes a plot summary useless, but there are three observations to be made. 1. The lack of emotional sequence helps communicate the whole Beckettian complex of ideas about life being pointless and strange. 2. Beckett's use of irrelevance derives but is distinct from Joyce's digressions in the later chapters of Ulysses. Joyce is exuberant, and overwhelms his lists with the names of heroes or vegetables; Beckett is stark, and pads his writing out, say, the permutations of five objects in three holes. This habit dates from Murphy (the ordering of the five biscuits), and is part of Beckett's shtick about life being not just pointless but uninterestingly so. 3. I was delighted by the weird ingenuity of Mr Knott's household arrangements (esp. this magnificent passage about a large family of variously damaged people that is to feed its dog Mr Knott's leftovers), and by the pastiches of mathematical reasoning, but I wonder if a lot of readers wouldn't find these passages merely outlandish.

The prose is wonderful throughout, but this is usually the case with Beckett. (Some highlights: "Life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it." "All the old ways led to this... the wild country roads where your dead walk beside you, on the dark shingle the turning for the last time again to the lights of the little town, the appointments kept and the appointments broken, all the delights of urban and rural change of place, all the exitus and redditus, closed and ended. All led to this, to this gloaming where a middle-aged man sits masturbating his snout, waiting for the first dawn to break.") There's the rest of Arsene's famous speech, of course, and I also like the distinctive jerky effect Beckett gets out of hobbling his sentences with commas every three words or so. e.g. "He stood, by the door, of the house, in his clothes."

This is my favorite of Beckett's novels--many of the images and scenes are still etched in my mind.

If you haven't read Beckett's first full novel, Murphy, you shouldn't read Watt. Read Murphy first.

Watt serves as a bridge of sorts between Murphy and the trilogy. Murphy is more like other Modernist novels; the trilogy seems (to me, at least) more like Beckett's plays.

If you read Molloy, Malone Dies, or the Unnamable, and you found it a tad opaque, you may enjoy Watt more.