Watt was the beginning of Samuel Beckett's post-war literary career, the fruition of his years spent in hiding from the Gestapo in the Vaucluse mountains, which also largely inspired "Waiting for Godot'.
Despite these circumstances,"Watt"remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish - a philosophical novel full of the grim humour that was already his trade-mark in such earlier fictions as"More Pricks Than Kicks"and"Murphy'.
The preambulations of "Watt', especially in the home of the eccentric Mr. Knott, and the sketching of logic to elicit meaning, must be among the most comic inventions of modern literature.
First published by the libertine Olympia Press in 1953 it has established itself as one of the most quoted and best-loved of Beckett's novels. The typographical oddities and omissions are as Beckett left the text.
