HOW IS IT BY SAMUEL BECKETT

How is it is a novel by Samuel Beckett frist published in French in 1961. The Grove Press published Beckett´s English translation in 1964
This novel is a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through endless mud, recalling his life separated into three distenct periods

The text is divided into three parts:

 “before Pim” : the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming a “couple”.

“with Pim”: the narrator is motionless in the mud-dark until he is abandoned by Pim.

“after Pim”:the narrator returns to his earlier solitude but without motion in the mud-dark.

In a letter (April 6, 1960) to Donald McWhinnie of the BBC Radio Drama Company, 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 thepresent, already over."
The novel served as inspiration for Miroslaw Balka's 2009 work, How It Is, in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.