Book Review: "How It Is" by Samuel Beckett

You might be wondering about why I'm reading Samuel Beckett and I'm going to be really honest with you here: it was cheap. Shopping for used books makes me feel good because books which have a label of costing £10 or so, suddenly go down to £1 to £3 each. Not only do you feel like you're getting a bargain, but if you've got £10 to spend on books, you can now get several as opposed to one and you get to support some great second-hand bookshops. However, you also need to be careful with second hand bookshops. There has been times where I have ordered a Saul Bellow book and received and entirely different Saul Bellow book - so there's a weird issue. I have no idea how common that is.

We start in the mud and darkness, our narrator is crawling through it. He emphasizes how monotonous and difficult the crawling is, selling it to the reader that there is something both important and baseless to this torture. He's going through a laborious journey, but there is something about it that feels a bit wrong. It's really the way it's told to us - without emotion and without tension. It goes something like "right leg right arm..." and a series of commands the writer gives himself. This setting establishes a bleak and formless world, reflecting themes of isolation and existential despair. The narrator's physical struggle through the mud serves as a metaphor for the human condition, where progress is arduous and meaning is elusive. You all know how I love the existential despair through suggestive language that eludes any emotion ever in literature. Well, that was sarcasm because my thing is more sentimental, heavily atmospheric and emotional stuff, but this I can get on board with as well.

As the narrator crawls through the mud, he intermittently recalls fragmented memories of his past life "above," including images of a woman and religious instruction during his childhood. These are all without any context and often feel difficult to put together. I have to say that when people call this Beckett's most difficult text because, I would say it definitely is. This part can really feel disjointed to the point of alienating the reader a bit, but I have faith in Samuel Beckett to set it right with some philosophical insight. There's a fragility of memory as well, represented by how horrid the present is and how kind of elusive the past seems to be. It's clear that Beckett is trying to teach us about the role of memory in purpose and how existentialism relies on the degradation of memory.

In the second part of the novel, the narrator encounters another being in the mud, whom he names Pim. Eventually, this descends into the narrator abusing Pim and Pim afterwards, disappears under ambiguous circumstances. The narrator spends a long time looking back at this and their spiteful behaviour. There are many repeated phrases in this book as well, which add to the 'looking back' and the fragmented nature of memory. The one that was really weird to me was "I say it as I hear it." It just seems to suggest that he is 'hearing' rather than 'living' these memories and so you kind of have to question what he is remembering. There are allusions to Dante's Inferno, but they seem to be so obtuse that anyone who had not read the Inferno beforehand might have difficulty understanding how it represents limitation and stagnation. I mean I used Dante's Divine Comedy in my undergraduate dissertation and even I was just there like 'well, that was a bit out there wasn't it?'

All in all, I found this book to be slightly more difficult to conceptualise than I would have hoped but that doesn't mean that I regret reading it. I'm just glad I had the time to sit with it for a while. At first glance, the book seems fairly easy, but I don't want to be pedantic with you and again reiterate the philosophical inflections and observations Beckett makes. I think I am right in saying this though: what Beckett isn't saying is just as important as what he is saying.