A vintage copy of How It Is by Samuel Beckett 

First published in French as Comment c’est by Les Editions de Minuit in 1961. The title is Beckett’s literal translation of the French phrase, comment c’est (how it is), a pun on the French verb commencer or ‘to begin’. In a letter (April 6, 1960) to Donald McWhinnie at BBC Radio Drama, Beckett explained his strange text as the product of a ” ‘man’ lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ‘life’ as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him… The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within… It is in the third part that occurs the so-called voice ‘quaqua’, its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the ‘I’ is from the outset in the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over.”

Found items are as is and final sale.