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Title: The Town and the City by John Kerouac, Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0-15-690790-9 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: October, 1983 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I Love This Book
Comment: I had read virtually everything ever written by Jack, excluding
this book, because I'd heard it was his "Tom Wolf" novel and he'd
yet to develop his own style...so after all these years I finally
got around to reading it...and was absolutely overwhelmed by
how great it is...so if you're a Kerouac lover and haven't read
this "family saga" yet, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Other reviewers have described it well, so I'll just mention two
highlights...both in the "City" section: the first is where
Levinsky (Allen Ginsberg of course) plays head games with people
on a New York subway car (beginning around p. 376) and the second
is this fantastic/funny/brilliant monologue about marijuana and
cockroaches, (around p. 403). In a way, I'm glad I waited all
this time to finally get around to reading this wonderful novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Kerouac We Never Knew
Comment: Yes, this is Kerouac's first published novel. Yes, it is fundamentally autobiographical. Yes, it is stylistically derivative of Thomas Wolfe's epic novels. But there is more here for Kerouac devotees than these standard descriptions.
First, when centered between the works written immediately before and after The Town and the City (specifically, the selections of short pieces recently published in Atop an Underwood and Kerouac's second published novel, On the Road)a clear picture of a writer's development emerges. The Town and the City has a sustained narrative that builds to a satisfying conclusion. This would change over time as Kerouac became more focused on episodic writing in his novels--for instance, lengthy descriptions of jazz club settings in The Subteraneans, or maybe the best example, the tape transcriptions of conversations with Neal Cassady in Visions of Cody--and found little need for pure resolution. The beginning of this shift is noticeable in On the Road, when the detailed re-creation of a car ride takes precedent over plot. This type of writing is not to be found in The Town and the City.
Second, Kerouac's development as a human being presents itself as his themes are precipitated by the death of his father and the implicit responsibility for his family Kerouac (embodied in the character of Peter) would wrestle with for the rest of his life.
Third, Kerouac, almost shockingly, finds his literary voice in the final two-hundred pages of the novel. While most of the book moves along with the languid prose of a young writer imitating his idols, the "City" sections show Kerouac opening up, taking more risks, and discovering the type of writing that would become his trademark: Rythmic, unique, and energized accounts of characters almost willing their lives to unfold before them, and dead-on, perfectly real dialogue that makes you believe Kerouac had a tape recorder with him everywhere he went.
Finally, for those who've studied Kerouac's life and those that have visited his hometown of Lowell, you will see Kerouac struggling to fictionalize people, places, and events. This is a struggle he pretty much abandoned with On The Road, going so far as to use "Real Names" in the original draft. It is especially apparent in The Town and the City when Waldo committs suicide by jumping out of a window at Kenneth Wood's apartment. This episode was undoubtedly based on Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. But Kerouac changes the murder to a suicide, and then attempts to fill Kenneth Wood with the same guilt Lucien Carr felt over the incident by implying that Kenneth might have pushed Waldo out the window. The result? It's not believable. Something Kerouac himself must have felt.
Kerouac claimed that the original inspiration for his spontaneous prose style was a forty-page letter he received from Neal Cassady before writing On the Road. The Town and the City shows Kerouac was already discovering a voice of his own and exploring the places and people that would dominate his fiction for the remainder of his career. It was that letter, though, that hurled him into a different realm, showing him the possibilities of a wild, new bop prosody, later leading to a recognition of Kerouac as a pioneering, risk-taking, totally unique writer. Had Cassady never sent that letter, we might well be talking of Kerouac today as a stylistic extension of Thomas Wolfe, or we may not be talking of him at all. Still, The Town and the City proves, with or without Neal's letter, Kerouac had greatness in him all along.
Rating: 4
Summary: My Favourite Beat Angel...
Comment: The Town And The City tracks the lives of the Martin family (5 sons and 3 daughters) growing up, living loving and discovering themselves, the world and others in the small town of Galloway in Massachusetts in the early 1900's. From the football star, to the lonely scholar, to the forever wandering heartbreaker of a truck driver, Kerouac deals with each of the siblings separately, describing their very different lives and in doing so, gives us the readers, a glimpse into each of their souls.
The book can be read as a largely autobiographical account of Kerouac's life, with each of the Martin sons representing alternative parts of himself, his feelings, thoughts and personality. Alternatively, the reader can lose themselves in the lives of the Martin family without concerning themselves with the real or the elaborated.
Kerouac reaches the reader with soaring, descriptive writing, which transform the mundane and everyday into feelings and emotions which describe the things you've always thought and felt but could never articulate into words...
"He was sick now with a crying lonesomeness, he somehow knew that all moments were farewell, all life was goodbye."
Kerouac himself describes the book as, "The sum of myself as far as the written word can go." The great American novel? Possibly, but this book is definately an essential for all Kerouac fans, people who have ever wondered what somebody else was thinking and all those who have raged on into the lonely night looking for an 'angelheaded hipster' to give them meaning.
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Title: Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0802131867 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: On the Road by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0140042598 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0140042520 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0802130747 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0140179070 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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