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. ( )

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. ( )

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.

Along with Nabokov's "Lolita," "Naked Lunch" stands in the vanguard of break-through novels written in the 1950s. This isn't the world of Beaver Cleaver, drive-ins, and "American Graffiti" mythologizing. Enter a world of gay hustlers, drug addicts, secret alien cabals, chest-bursting centipedes, and "The Abortionist Kid."

No linear plot connects these hallucinatory, violent, and dream-like vignettes. Paranoia, pleasure, pain, and panic interconnect the work like diseased nerve-endings, throbbing for stimulation and the next kick.

Burroughs also gives an autobiographical and erudite account of heroin addiction in his "Atrophied Preface." Hard to believe some of the most disturbing fiction in the 20th century was written by someone who looked like an Iowa insurance adjuster. ( )

I'm not quite sure what I think of this book. When I began it I did not have much knowledge of what it was about, I had just known about WillIam Burrough's reputation and influence in the world of writing. So I casually picked this book up one day, and upon starting it, it had actually angered me, or some other form of distrubance/disgust stemming from unknowingly jumping into a novel that is much like a day that drags on for 48 hours, filled with the hysteria of a drug induced confusion, complete with the strange and dark shadows that emerge when coming down, and the dirty, raw sexual lust that most people deny completely.

I was not expecting this.. and at first I hated the book. I hated it for the lack of plot, for the long winded, confusing whirlwind of experiences that had no reference to a plot or a continuum of experience (or so it seemed). But then about halfway through I began to think more of the actual experience I had during my journey through this book and it clicked. I had put aside my disdain for it's unconventionality and began to realize that the response from the book must be somewhat like what this character (or characters) in this book must be experiencing.

Now that I am done with the book I have come to appreciate it for what it was meant to be. I was disgusted, shocked, annoyed, and intrigued, and the year is 2009. I cannot imagine what it would have been like reading this around the time it was finally published. So in summation I have to say I didn't necessarily 'enjoy' reading this book, it was more like I couldn't turn away from it.. it was a guilty intrigue that made me stick it out to the end, and when I finally put it down I wanted to crack it open and peer into it again. Which is the point of this book in my opinion.. just like the junk fiend. ( )