 
|
|
 |
|
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
| List Price: |
$13.00 |
Unavailable for
purchase at this time |
|
Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Hustler-addict Bill Lee travels from New York to Tangiers, running from the police and searching for a place to take drugs, until he enters the hallucinatory fantasy world of Interzone, where individual freedom confronts the forces of totalitarianism. Reissue.
"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.
| Customer Reviews: |
|
| |
| Distrurbing |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
 |
|
This book is chock-full of topics that would make most people curl. I highly suggest seeing the movie (though it deviates from the book a bit) before reading this. If the movie is your cup of tea, then have at it. Many drugs, multiple kinds of sex, and psychic absurdities are all contained within these pages.
|
| Horrid |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
 |
|
A junkie's free association, stream of consciousness, graphically detailed wet-dream.
Were it not for the obscenity lawsuit in Massachusettes against Burroughs for this book, it would have long ago, and rightfully so, faded into obscurity.
|
| What quivers at the end of your fork......? |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
= I first read this book quite a number of years ago. Reading it again, I'm struck by how fresh the "lunch" still is, hardly what one would expect from something served up nearly a half-century ago.
= Even more striking to me is to what degree this book apparently influenced me and helped to shape (some might say "warp") my outlook aesthetically, politically, and sexually...something the conformist, as well as the timid, might want to consider a warning, I suppose.
=What I didn't realize the first time around was how funny *Naked Lunch* is. Maybe you have to grow into an awareness of the black humor and dour satire here, but Burroughs is a very funny writer; in fact, there may be none funnier of modern vintage.
=Stylistically, Burroughs was writing the way the internet reads long before the internet was ever conceived. His friend Brion Gysin taught him that writing was fifty years behind painting and Burroughs aimed to make up the distance. As a whole, even today, most writers haven't come within even shouting distance of Burroughs' backside. Today, the vast majority of even "serious" novels are written as if we were still living in the 19th century. This will have to change if books are to survive the digital revolution.
=It is to a large degree Burroughs' mosaic, telegraphic, transitionless, jump-style that gives "Naked Lunch" the feel of a novel that is still ahead of its time--it moves the way the mind moves, the way the mouse moves from site to site as we surf the web, or how our thumb moves over the remote that brings us the ten thousand broadcasts available on our satellite TVs.
=And, of course, there is the controversial content, the obscene skits and x-rated routines, the drugs and perversions that forced the likes of Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to vouch for its literary value in court so as to prevent its being banned altogether. Even today there are passages that have the power to shock the upstanding and rub the politically correct the wrong way. Let's just say that "Naked Lunch" isn't likely to be an Oprah Book Club pick any time in the near future.
=There are few books that I've reread after an intervening period years that held up to my previous high estimation of them, that didn't turn out gilt in memory as being better than they were, that still had the power to surprise and affect me on a second, more mature reading as did "Naked Lunch."
=Not only did it have a profound influence on me, but I suspect it continues to influence me, and will do so going forward. "Naked Lunch" is, in my opinion, one of the seminal works of the 20th century and will eventually be seen as such when the rest of the world catches up to the avant-garde position Burroughs took up fifty years ago.
|
| Terrible communcation. |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
|
|
The seller did not communicate with me that the book I ordered was never sent. He only informed me after I contacted them a month after the purchase the book was not available and that they would give me a refund.
|
| Not Impressed. |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
 |
|
I wanted to read this book because so many people told me it was a great book, and it had been banned, so I knew it must be good.
I have now talked to many people who do not think it is a masterpiece or anything even close. It is different from most books I have ever read, but the stories themselves did not flow well, especially not together as one. It was not memorable for me. I won't be re-reading this one.
|
|
