Watt

By: Samuel Beckett

Narrated by: Dermot Crowley

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in the series' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe.

Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor.

The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history. Watt is at times extremely funny, bizarre, allusive and richly poetic. Though 'early' Beckett, the novel shows the author to be a remarkable virtuoso, investing plot and pace with classical, intellectual and earthy content style.

Dermot Crowley proves himself a towering Beckett performer, matching clarity with flair; and with its musical surprises (arranged and conducted by Roger Marsh), the recording shows that, once again, a key Becket novel comes to life unforgettably in the audiobook medium.

©2009 The Estate of Samuel Beckett (P)2016 Ukemi Productions Ltd

Dermot Crowley!

Watt is one of Beckett’s most peculiar and least traditional novels, and that’s saying a lot. Listening to it without any context is a beautiful way to approach it — because Watt is, at its core, a novel about dislocation, absurdity, and the slow deterioration of meaning itself. That being said, it was easier for me to appreciate it by both listening to Dermot Crowley’s excellent narration and also occasionally reading along with some of the more difficult to follow parts.
The surface plot is simple — deceptively so. A man named Watt arrives at the house of a Mr. Knott to work as his servant. That’s… basically it. But the book isn’t about what happens. It’s about how it’s told, and the experience of living through the breakdown of logic, language, and identity.

But instead of narrative flow, you get:
• Sentences looped in absurd redundancy
• Obsessive, mechanical repetition
• Language that begins to unravel itself
• A deep sense of meaning being disassembled before your ears/eyes.

I highly recommend this audiobook with Dermot Crowley and I’ll add Watt to my list of Samuel Beckett favorites!

Watt is the Point?

Thank you, Dermot Crowley, for a wonderful performance of Beckett's brilliance. There is narration, singing, choral singing, poetry, lists, rhythms, abstractions, puns! Beckett philosophy and absurdist humor.

Interesting and thorough

Beckett exhibits an interesting perspective writing for Watt, a very specific and thoughtful, methodical way of cateloging the world, which interests both the part of my brain that craves specific details and logic, my inner programmer, as well as the part of my mild that craves the child like ranting of songs like the 12 days of Christmas

outstanding reading of challenging, but funny work

Dermot Crowley does a terrific job of rendering at once the meaning and the humor of Beckett's Watt. Watt is not an easy text, but, apart from its own depths, it serves as a kind of prelude to the masterpieces that follow it, like the "trilogy." It's both enjoyable and helpful to have a first-rate Irish reader carry us through. For anyone willing to tackle this challenging text, Crowley's rendering is a delight.

Great performance!

Samuel Beckett at his best, plus amazing performance by the reader of a difficult but ultimately magnificent novel.