Incidentally Samuel Beckett’s first work I happened to read was not Waiting for Godot, but his novel Watt. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon a copy of the book on the shelves of a small private library opposite Elite hotel in Fort Kochi over two decades ago. I borrowed the book and read it, if I remember correctly, in one or two sittings.

The experience that reading Watt gave me I’m unable to explain in words. So I borrow from Coetzee. (I’m at the fag end of Youth and here the narrator writes about Beckett).

“Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time? In Ford there has always been an element of the stuffed shirt that he has disliked but has been hesitant to acknowledge, something to do with the value Ford placed on knowing where in the West End to buy the best motoring gloves or how to tell a Medoc (wine) from a Beaune; whereas Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself prefer to be.” (p-155).