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Loading... Naked Lunchby William S. Burroughs
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. My favorite non-Joyce book. Overwhelmingly lyrical, great images, and themes that I thoroughly support. An essential American novel. Another book, like Finnegan's Wake, where people will say "I don't understand it" when you have to realize it is a lot more basic than understanding the narrative flow, you just have to react emotionally to what's being presented to you, and not ask so many questions. (  ) phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 |  El álgebra de la necesidad según Burroughs. (  ) darioha | Oct 13, 2009 | It was an interesting read. I stopped halfway through and read another book and almost didn't come back to it. This book is definitely more in the Beat style of Allen Ginsberg than the Beat style of Jack Kerouac. Although it is called a novel, it is similar to a lot of Beat poetry from the same era. I feel like I used to enjoy this type of book a lot more in my younger days. So it goes, I guess, our tastes are ever-changing. (  ) joelshults | Jul 9, 2009 | It was an interesting read. I stopped halfway through and read another book and almost didn't come back to it. This book is definitely more in the Beat style of Allen Ginsberg than the Beat style of Jack Kerouac. Although it is called a novel, it is similar to a lot of Beat poetry from the same era. I feel like I used to enjoy this type of book a lot more in my younger days. So it goes, I guess, our tastes are ever-changing. ( ) joelshults | Jul 9, 2009 | On page 200 of Naked Lunch, our narrator (perhaps we are to believe it is actually Burroughs?) confesses, "I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity.' . . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function. . . . I am not an entertainer. . . ." Of course, if it takes you this long to figure this out, you must not have been reading the same book. Naked Lunch is certainly not entertaining. It is not coherent, it is not logical, it is not pretty, it is not for the faint of heart, and it is not in any way concerned with making any sense whatsoever. In this paragraph, which in most of my reviews is devoted to plot summary, I say these things because I have nothing to say about the plot at all. What plot? What series of events? Often, Burroughs is content with merely offering vague ideas of scenes and then inundating us with scatological and sexual imagery, body parts and fluids and substances freakishly spewed across the page. Grammar need not apply in this world. I've read other Burroughs before, so I probably should have expected this, but it's just not something I have a great deal of interest in or enthusiasm for. It is a trial just to read through the whole thing, and I like to think that I have a pretty strong stomach for the kind of graphic images that Burroughs thrives upon. It's just that, once you get past the grossness, I don't see much behind it. I don't feel the need or desire to dig deeper to understand the subconscious ideas underpinning the words. I don't care enough about what I've read to try and make sense of what happened. Burroughs wants us to see the horror of drug abuse and the disgust that is our capitalist lives, but nothing in the text makes me care all that much. I will probably read the other Burroughs that are on the 1001 list, simply to say that I have, but I will confess that I simply don't get it. If that somehow makes this review useless to you, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Anyone who picks up Naked Lunch deserves to know in advance what they're getting themselves into--I did, and there's a part of me that wishes I'd never bothered in the first place. dczapka | Jun 8, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0802132952, Paperback)"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America. Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:08 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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