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Title: Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac ISBN: 0-8021-3186-7 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: September, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (33 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Kerouac puts truth, poetry, and a little madness on paper
Comment: Anyone who has read more than one novel by Jack Kerouac knows that his style varies. In Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes with atypical lucidity. In Big Sur (what I think is his greatest novel), he goes an entire first chapter with the use of one period. Of the five books by Kerouac I have read (the fifth book being On The Road), Subterraneans reads the most like Tristessa. The style of each book is more fractured than in the others, making it sometimes more difficult to follow. But in each book Kerouac finds a stride and rhythm to his work that soon carries the reader away. In Subterraneans, Kerouac tells the story of a relationship with Mardou Fox, a part Native-American, part African-American, mentally barely stable, twenty-one year old woman. Though Kerouac is almost 10 years older, they seem a great match. As usual, Kerouac's tale takes him through bar- and apartment-hopping parties, intellectual upheavals, drunken sprawling adventures, and bitter hangover realizations. The thread of unity throughout is the experience of his evolving relationship with Mardou, his deep self-realizations, his anger, love, and pain. When I finished the book I knew Kerouac had once again found something true amid his temporary madnesses and put it on paper for me to read. I closed the book and felt I had read something beautiful. Kerouac, you did it again.
Rating: 4
Summary: A story well told despite the rambling
Comment: I don't know what you'd call the prose style of this book. It seems to be a "stream of consciousness" style where Kerouac tells a story and includes all of his related thoughts as he is telling the story, whether those related thoughts are intelligible to the reader or not.
I'm not a fan of styles of novel writing other than the standard format of normal sentences and paragraphs(such as that found in ON THE ROAD). Jack rambles on and on at times for two pages in this book without the benefit of a paragraph or a period breaking his flow.
But regardless of its difficult style which makes somewhat less effective than it could be, the story is presented with skill and coherence. Jack is able to evoke coherent human feeling through his writing, in the midst of the rambling .
This story written in and set in early 1950's San Francisco. It is based apparently on a true story, the love of Kerouac, who in the story is called Leo Percepied with a half-Cherokee half-black mentally unstable bohemian lady whom is called Mardou Fox. Mardou is portrayed as a tragic figure, a very beautiful lady, a sex object of the junkies and raffish intellectuals that Kerouac knows, abused and neglected in her childhood, full of the spirit and sadness of the Native American and the African American. I suppose the best writing is towards the end of the book. Here we actually see paragraphs to break the rambling and periods! Here the story becomes more coherent and the reader sees Leo reaching the climax of his struggle as his jealousy and unreliability and alcoholism takes its toll on his relationship with Mardou. He never 100 percent certain about whether he wants to be with Mardou. Mardou herself is a sometimes real, sometimes hard to grasp, a distant figure. The best part of the book is Leo (Kerouac). In his flaws and his actions the reader is able to grasp his humanness. I felt some empathy for him. I liked the part where he is at the railyard ,weeping, and reflecting on his mother and upbraiding himself for being unreliable.
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing masterpiece of american lit
Comment: This and Big Sur prove to me that Kerouac was worth all the hype. I as most started with On the Road. but soon graduated on to real literature. OTR and Dharma Bums were great reads, but each was fake self grandising fare. This book and Big Sur were gut wrenching tales of truth.
Many have said they had trouble reading or uderstanding this book due to the style it was writtem The first time I read this book I drank more than jack on a 3 day binge, and could still follow the story. If you had problems that has something to do with you, not the way this masterpiece was written.
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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: Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson ISBN: 1573225053 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan ISBN: 0140168125 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1992 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: 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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