How it Is

About this book

Published as Comment c'estin French in 1961, and in Beckett's English in 1964, How It Isdivides into three equal parts and is composed throughout in brief unpunctuated paragraphs. These tell of a narrator crawling in darkness, repeating his life as he hears it, obscurely uttered by another voice. The telling is tirelessly explicit about the feelings that pervade this world, but fragmentary and vague about all else. Together with Molloy, Samuel Beckett's How It Iscounts for many readers as his greatest novel. It is also his most innovative and challenging, both stylistically and for its extreme furthering of the vision of a self in reduced circumstances, inaugurated in his earlier sequence of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable).