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London: John Calder. 1964. 8vo. Original full fawn morocco, lettered and lined in gilt to spine, printed on handmade paper, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, publisher's fawn paper slipcase; pp. 160; spine a touch faded, pages predominantly uncut, slipcase with a few surface marks and marginal fading; a crisp, very near fine copy.One of 100 numbered copies signed by Samuel Beckett, hors commerce, bound in full morocco and printed on handmade paper (Series B); this is copy no. 8.How It Is, translated by the author, was issued three years after the original French Comment C'est. In three parts, a precis of which appears in the opening words - "how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it" - the work unfolds in a series of short, unpunctuated "paragraphs" (they are not paragraphs any more than the work is what we think of as a novel). The unnamed narrator, lying in dark and mud, relates what he hears (or remembers) from a different voice: the story, obliquely, of a life (his life?) and predicament before, during, and after the pivotal encounter with Pim (though we can't be sure about any of this).Beckett began writing How It Is in December 1958 while staying at his country retreat, a small house near the village of Ussy-sur-Marne, sixty kilometres away from Paris. Edouard Magessa O'Reilly (the work's most recent editor) notes that early drafts include references to the details of the author's daily life, to the moles, for example, tearing up his plant beds and mentioned in letters from this time. Such quotidian detail, however, was strategically excised from the finished text. Abstract and enigmatic, the work is nevertheless unflinching in its account of violence and cruelty; the unpunctuated yet measured prose rendering its graphic descriptions of mutilation even more disturbing. Certainly, the bleakest, and among the most "difficult", of Beckett's works, it is one of the great prose works of the last century.In addition to the morocco edition of 100 copies (B1-100), 100 copies were issued in vellum (signed and numbered A1-100). The UK trade edition was published by John Calder on April 30th, 1964, in an edition of 4000 copies. See How It Is, edited by Edouard Magessa O'Reilly (London: Faber and Faber, 2009).Federman and Fletcher 384.101.
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