Big Sur - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007115172 ISBN 13: 9780007115174

Publisher: Flamingo HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001

Synopsis

"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker & Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. "Big Sur's humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a suerior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished—others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, & here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur."-—Allen Ginsberg

About this title

About the Author

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.

From AudioFile

This autobiographical novel continues the adventures of the (older but certainly not mellower) wandering beatnik from ON THE ROAD. For a narrator it contains extraordinary difficulties, for the writing flies off into inebriated, overly long sentences that reflect, describe or just babble forward in a kind of free association. To keep such passages flowing while making sense out of them is no mean feat. Tom Parker pulls it off, erring only infrequently in his interpretation. He even manages to sound as if he were enjoying himself. The production is clean but tinny, possibly dampening the pleasure of home listeners, but hardly bothering drivers listening over traffic noise. Y.R. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo HarperCollinsPublishers
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007115172
• ISBN 13: 9780007115174
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224