Rating: 
Summary: Kerouac's most honest work
Review: Big Sur was the third book by Jack Kerouac that I read (On the Road being the first and Satori in Paris being the second). I thought nothing would top On the Road, but this did. I tried explaining to a friend why I thought this book was better than On the Road, and I told him this book was so much more honest, and so much more grittier. Some of the descriptions Jack gives throughout this book, such as his description of what it's like to be an alcoholic towards the book's beginning, are wonderful. The ending of the book, with Jack returning home to be with his mother (whom he would hardly ever leave for the rest of his life) is truly heartbreaking, and the last line "there's no need to say another word" takes on even more significance when one realizes that this book marks the end of Jack's truly creative period. He continued writing after this, but the works he put out post Big Sur couldn't compare to earlier pieces like this (just read Satori in Paris if you want to see what I mean). I haven't read all of Kerouac's books yet (I'm in the middle of Visions of Gerard) but I would have to say that it's a toss up between this book or the Subterreans as to which is my favorite. Think about this: in the Subterreans, he merely lost a girl. In Big Sur, he lost himself.
Rating:
Summary: the down Beat
Review: By 1962 alcohol had become the combustible propellent of Jack Kerouac's saturated imagination. Like matches to the wick, binges could last weeks. 'Big Sur' brings a much different narrator than the frenetic idealist of 'On The Road'. When that was published, years after it had been written, he was touted as the bard of a new generation, a moniker he grew to deeply resent. Popular culture soon trivialized the 'Beats' into a parody of bongo drums and bad poetry. He became perceived by critics as a passing fad. A wounded Kerouac, his attempts to be recognized as a serious writer in disarray, hoped to dry out in a solitary retreat at a cabin at Big Sur. It would be his last genuine effort at sobriety, and this book would become his last great novel. Much of the book was written in the afterglow of hangovers, or the buzz of the day's first drink. There is weariness here, a sedated fatalism. His spirituality struggles with morbidity. Still, Kerouac's sensual, sensitive poetic prose might have reached its most sublime character in 'Big Sur', even in its fevered sparks of delirium tremens. It drifts, as Kerouac was drifting, in the disillusionment of the post-Beat rancor, then swirls into eddies of luminous energy. The flow of consciousness is viewed as if through a prism which gives experience a subjective, surreal semblance of order. It seems so tantalizingly close to grasping some illusive meaning, that talisman Kerouac had followed through friendships, terrestrial and spiritual wandering, hardscrabble existence, inebriation, all his life. There is a little quip at the start of the book about the copyright problems he was having with previous publishers, regarding the use of the various names he had attributed to the pantheon of his 'beatnik' friends. The group who became the century's most legendary collection of literary iconoclasts. He describes all of his books as a single Proustian comedy of raging action, folly, sweetness. He whimsies spending his old age reinserting a consistent nomenclature. Of course, the old age would never be. A coherent structure, though, might have robbed the books of their intrinsic spontaneity, the root of their innocence. With all this, there is still a persistent, if subdued, cadence (a beat!) and a wry, if exhausted, humour. Lament or comedy, the roaring storm of On The Road, came crashing ashore at Big Sur, leaving the author a crumpled wreck on the beach. But from these bookends you can glean Kerouac's exhilarating, sad odyssey. 'Big Sur' is its most wrenchingly personal and expressive chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: Big Sur, An Extravagantly Interpretive Review
Review: By the time I had made it to Kerouac's Big Sur, I had already traveled through the pages of On The Road and The Dharma Bums. It was fascinating to observe Kerouac's transformation from one book to the next. In Big Sur, Kerouac moves beyond the idealistic explorations of his earlier work and begins forming conclusions about the meaning of life. And he doesn't like what he's found -- that the meaning of life is life itself -- that his physical substance is the manifestation of evolution, genetics, and fractal probability -- and that the evolution he's discovered is far more than an evolution from monkeys, lung-fish, or single-celled creatures -- but, instead, he seems to contemplate his evolution from the infinitely-old dust of the cosmoses -- that every sub-atomic particle making up his being has been made and remade a trillion times into countless other forms -- part of a tree, part of a rock, liquid metal in a subterranean pool, little creatures fighting for food -- and all of this on a thousand other worlds, over unimaginable expanses of time. When Kerouac contemplates all of this, and the relative unlikelihood of his existence, he is overwhelmed by his responsibility to the singleness of his circumstance. He feels he's been wasting his life "writing down useless sounds." of the world. For who? For what? This is where he seems to slip into some kind of Catholic-Zen-Buddhist insanity, and has the big existential crisis that eventually drives him to detachment, alcoholism, and an early grave. Without a doubt we should be grateful that he compounds the big dents his very existence has made in the existential-probability curve, and bothers to write his thoughts down for us to consider. He dared to look into the eyes of his God and was blasted into a million little pieces by the power of what he saw as the total truth. The miracle of Kerouac's writing is how he never actually says any of these things, but undeniably hints at them by discussing the usefulness of the 25-cent scrub pad he uses to do his dishes. It is Kerouac's relationship to his environment that tells the story. His understanding and reaction to the virtues and corruptions of the world (including his own) is the fuel that powers his pen.
Rating:
Summary: Big Sure
Review: Completely enjoyable and necessary to Big Sur fans. Written with knowledge, experience and love. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Better than "On the Road"
Review: Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed On the Road as the next Joe Shmoe but it wasn't as deep and insightful as Big Sur. Here Jack deals with alcoholism, sexual frustration, a few pretty interesting nervous breakdowns and spiritual breakdowns, people that dont give rides anymore, his fear and owe of the sea, a chair that ends up breaking, naps in a park, and how his feet hurt after walking from Big Sur to San Fran. very interesting reading---very recommended!
Rating:
Summary: The End to The Life of A Literary Legend
Review: For any true fans of Jack Kerouac, this book marks the end of a semi-productive career for this writer. Several years after On The Road, Big Sur provides a dark and twisted reflection of the more jovial and adventurous atmosphere to On The Road. The Duluoz Legend was never so grim, nor so sober as in this installation to the saga that was Jack Kerouac. People from Kerouac's daily life make candid appearances throughout the book through characterized aliases. Ferlinghetti appears as Montrose, yet the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco is mentioned the same as in real life. In this story, Kerouac comes to terms with himself, and what his life has really meant over the past years. Through the advice of friends, and by a drunken depression, Jack Duluoz(Kerouac) appears as the truly tragic figure he was near the end of his life in St. Petersburg, FL. I feel it safe to say that in this instance, art truly imitates life. I recommend this book to anyone, mostly to those who've read On The Road, and more specifically to those who have become influenced through the writings of this 20th Century legend.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for anyone.
Review: For those of you have read "On the Road" this book will not compare. In Big Sur Jack Kerouac is no longer a free-spirited youth in search of the Beat "Ideals" of freedom and life lived for the moment. Instead Kerouac finds himself lost in a generation that he began but no longer understands nor do they understand him. It is clear in the writing in this book that Kerouac is bordering on insanity. He is ravished by alcohol and is able to bring you into his mind so vividly that you cannot help but feel apart of him. Although extremely gritty and dark at times the book also has some beautiful passages where Kerouac simply describes his surroundings that nearly left me in tears. The writing conveys thought and feeling that I have experienced before. After reading this I truely feeling that is book is part of who I am, never has a book effected my outlook on life and the world we live in.
Rating:
Summary: A book for non-poseurs
Review: I love this book. It's deeply flawed and that's what makes it perfect. I read it some years ago while on a trip through the American Southwest and ever since then I occassionally pick it up and read around in it, as William Saroyan used to say, and every time I fall into the spell of JK's writing. "Big Sur" is heartfelt and true like few other novels. I'm sick of the whole Beat revival but this is a great, sad book, better and more honest, I think, than Kerouac's more famous "On the Road."
Rating:
Summary: An excellent follow-up to ON THE ROAD.
Review: I read this book directly after ON THE ROAD, and I have to say it is a remarkable follow up. One of the great things about Kerouac's work is even though this book did come out years after ON THE ROAD, the reader is able to fully understand and appreciate what it offers even without reading anything else by the author. Kerouac is still able to retain the same mood and overall appeal that he introduced the public to in his original classic even though this novel does come out years later. Though the character's names have all changed (from their original ON THE ROAD personas), the reader is able to recognize the menagerie and welcomes back the misadventures of old friends. Even if one is not a fan of the newly popular beat writers, Kerouac creates a story on the further search for humanity thoroughly enjoyable to anyone with the slightest interest in the essence of man and what it means to live.
Rating: 
Summary: may have some value as an artifact of the era
Review: I stumbled onto _On the Road_ in my high school's library in Fresno in the mid-70s. Even at that time, the book struck me as very dated. I enjoyed reading it because I was very curious about all the places Kerouac had visited. Barely sixteen years old, I had seen very little of my own country, let alone the world. Any information I could get about the outside world was of interest to me, and I spent hours and hours studying the maps and population charts in my father's auto atlas. Years later, I discovered that that obscure book I had read in high school was actually quite a famous one. For years now, I have been meaning to find another copy so that I can read it again and see what my perceptions of the book are now as an adult. Instead, I recently purchased a used copy of _Big Sur_ at a flea market. I know I'm gonna take a lot of flack for this, but I think Kerouac is hugely over-rated. I suppose his work has value as an artifact of Beatnik life in the 50s and early 60s, but I just can't see it being appreciated as especially great by future generations. In my opinion, much of the appeal surrounding Kerouac is based on hype. Something about the stream-of-consciousness style of his writing gives a first impression of profundity that just isn't there upon further reflection. His studied shunning of commas and apostrophes, and his love affair with parenthetical asides (many sentences have two or three with no break between them) (kind of like this) (I wonder how he convinced his publisher to let them stay) add to the obfuscation, making me wonder if he had lawyerly ambitions early in life. Kerouac's own words describe this hype best as this excerpt from the book shows: "But he's got this young kid he brought back from Reno called Ron Blake who is a goodlooking teenager with blond hair who wants to be a sensational new Chet Baker singer and comes on with that tiresome hipster approach that was natural five or ten and even twenty five years ago but now in 1960 is a pose, in fact I dug him as a con man conning Dave (tho for what, I don't know)." -p 51 in Grafton Books 1986 reprint, paperback Kerouac's character development seems about on par with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. None of the characters have any real depth. And it's hard to take his relationship with Billie seriously because we don't learn enough about her to decide whether we even like her or not. Perhaps the most inane part of the book is the two or three pages he spends expounding the Beat theory that all Americans suffer from a nagging guilt whose source they don't realize is the simple fact that they don't wash their behinds with soap and water after they defecate. I find little of any value to be learned from this supposed insight. The book may have some value for those seeking to gain insight into alcoholism. Then again, his dig at those "ignorant people who don't drink" in the quote below gives me the impression that Kerouac expects everyone to make the effort to understand him and his disease when he hasn't made any effort at all, as far as I can see, to reach outside of himself and understand anyone else: "It's all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining 'Why does God torture me?' - But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in {their} early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility." -p 95 Many people who have never touched a drop of drink face problems at least as difficult as those Kerouac had to deal with through no fault of their own. In addition, most of them have to hold down a job and face other responsibilities that care-free Kerouac was able to avoid for the most part.
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