Watt – Usado

In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Watt was the beginning of Samuel Becket’s post-war literary career, the fruition of the years in hiding in the Vaucluse mountains from the Gestapo, which also largely inspired Waiting for Godot. But it remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish.