Samuel Beckett – Watt (Olympia Press 1953)
Good Beckett, though I view this as sort of a warm-up for his classics Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. I say that because substantively this is a little less dense that those later works, but, in form, this is a breakthrough. All the unmistakable traits of Beckett’s writing are firmly in place here. He writes of the human condition in terms of distance, using declarative sentences repeated through every possible permutation in order to emphasize a total lack of common ground or common assumptions. But then, this is Beckett, so he makes all that seem quite absurd. This book would be horrifying if it wasn’t so damn funny.