Rating: 
Summary: Reflections Upon a Zen Paradox
Review: In this novel Keroauc starts to explore the possibilty
that he had become a victim of the caricature which he
had invented and chosen to portray. Inspired by Jack
London, he invented this personna whose disquise
he proudly modeled, forgetting the Zen imperative of
quiet detachment. He had painted himself into the
proverbal corner and the beautiful anquish laddened
writing exposes the pain this awareness instilled in him.
Let the world remember him for "On the Road", this book
is the one which I would choose to read in order to tap
into the realizations which he had made in his waning years.
Rating:
Summary: This may be the best of all Kerouac books.
Review: It has been about seven years since I have read this book, but it remains my favorite book by my favorite author of novels. The reason I give this review is because I am about to embark on a critical analysis of it for class. I hope that I come out of this sea of emotion with my breath still even! Out of all of his books this one portrays the crux of Kerouac's life dilemma. If one wants to read unbridled travel narrative, then s/he should go to "On the Road". If one wants to capture all the splendor of the youthful Beat mysticism at its prime, then "Dharma Bums" is likely the best bet. For sheer emotiveness, however, "Big Sur" is possibly without parallel in American literature. There is one scene that overflows with passion and entreaty to the cosmos. He is involved in a tortuous love affair as he attempts to get off of alcohol. All of this yearning and pathos piles into his psyche and all his mind can do is scream. I don't know about all of the rest of us, but this is a way that I have felt in my life. I am glad there is a novelist like Kerouac who succeeded in publicizing the essential anguish of the American tradition. If anyone wants to correspond with me on the matter of this book and others by him, please do so. Fresh and contemporary voices will add immeasurable breadth and meaning to my research project. Good day!
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Scary
Review: It's taken me about a year to process this book, having read it during a three-week motorcycle tour of the West in the summer of 2001. Big Sur is a much more mature work than On the Road. Kerouac was just finding his voice in On the Road. In Big Sur, he was dipping his pen into a very deep well of life experience that included shattered illusions and the horrors of alcoholism. By the time he wrote Big Sur, Kerouac had become a celebrity - something he never came to terms with - and he was a profoundly unbalanced and unhappy man. Nonetheless, he had an astonishing ability to get experiences that defy verbalization onto the page. His perceptions, especially in the throes of alcohol addiction, are incredibly acute and precise. Even if the events and conversations are complete fabrications, they ring of truth and reality and insight.
This is not an "easy" book, but it's a real milestone in 20th century American literature.
Rating:
Summary: A lacerating account of alcoholic descent
Review: Jack Kerouac is famed as the great romantic of the American road, but that reputation ignores his greatest quality as a writer - his searing honesty. By the mid-60s, Kerouac was barely recognisable as the poet laureate of footloose youth. He was bloated, depressed, and romantically disappointed. He was also an alcoholic. One of the many heartbreaking passages in "Big Sur" records his inability to hitch a ride up the Californian coast. Americans, en route to the summer of love, had annexed "beat" culture into the rising ethic of hippie-dom. Kerouac couldn't relate to it, and nor could the hippies relate to him. This cult hero for many hippies couldn't thumb a ride because - overweight, middle-aged and dressed as a down-at-heel working man - Kerouac looked no part of the hippie dream that, in part, he had helped inspire. Alone, lonely, drinking heavily and in terrible emotional and spiritual pain, Kerouac miraculously (for us) sustained his extraordinary honesty about his condition. This, his most truly personal book, is agonising to read - but it is through this book that we come to know him best, and most deeply feel his tragedy. If you've ever worried about your own drinking, this is the book to keep you sober.
Rating: 
Summary: kerouac's attempt at being James Joyce
Review: Jack Kerouac was one of the most dynamic figures in literary history. He was also one of America's greatest authors--he gave us two of the finest books written, _On the Road_ and _The Dharma Bums_, but _Big Sur_ shows that even he could write poorly. Big Sur is a stream of consciousness novel ... that deals with his alcoholism--though looking at the way Kerouac died, writing it taught him nothing. It doesn't contain the energy or the story that we find in On the Road of Dharma Bums. It's Kerouac's attempt at postmodernism and at showing us what his alcoholism was like. Kerouac is successful in that the confusion and nonlinear narrative does effectively show the confusion (...) of his alcoholism, but as a work of literature, it just fell short. I suppose the book is important in its portrayal of alcoholism and as a piece of Kerouac's work, but it just wasn't that enjoyable, and I was happy when it ended. A final note, Kerouac closes the novel with his (too) long poem "Sea" which was written when the events of this novel took place. It's a bad poem... On the back cover Ginsberg says some wonderful, and true things about Kerouac's writing. But Big Sur doesn't seem to fit the bill.
Rating: 
Summary: Get it! Read it! Hear it! Sing it! You'll love it!
Review: Kerouac's didn't just write a book, he wrote an epic, a song and a novel. No justice is done to his writting if it is ever read silently. You must read out loud. You must hear the melody of his words, even if its only from your own lips. I read it aloud with nothing in the room other than my beaten up couch and tired record player spinning John Coltrane. You simply must read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Kerouac's Divine-Comedy in Reverse: the 'Crack-Up'
Review: Kerouac's grittiest and most stubborn work: In a 20th century American tradition, along the lines of Bukowski and Fitzgerald, this is Kerouac's most painfully autobiographical book, documenting not just the later stages of his substance abuse, but chronicling an even more deleterious demon that took his soul: fame. This novel acts as a dreadful counterpoint to 'The Dharma Bums', a novel of contemplation and release, and its overlooked sub-theme of Kerouac's recognition of his own 'wine-stained teeth'. 'Big Sur' twists the Buddhas of old into vast valleys of craggy and vicious DTs inside his heart. As such, this novel describes more than just alcohol, or more than the icon-making industry of fame - this is a novel of where the old words got Kerouac, and all his senstivities and insecurities. Much of the old pantheon is here: Ginsberg, as the floatsam Irwin who barely figures into the picture, and Dean Moriarty - AKA Coady, the friend now turned antagonist, who - fresh from his two years in San Quentin - 'feeds' Kerouac his mistress in a self-destructive drama to end his own failing marriage. I've always enjoyed Kerouac's novels for their emphasis on character, rather than 'plot', and the storyline of this novel functions as many of his other works: a geographical tension - in this case, the isolation of the cabin at Big Sur versus the urban psycho-sprawl of San Fran; and, coupled with that, the personal tension of of lust and loneliness trying to convert itself into 'love', as in 'Tristessa'. The storyline here lacks the verve of 'On the Road' and the slow, spiritual gallop of 'The Dharma Bums'. 'Big Sur' unravels rather than tells: it depicts a kind of mosaic of panic in which the pieces become disassembled until ending in the falsely optimistic final chapter. This novel is unquestionably important to the Kerouacian Divine Comedy. Stylistically, it relies on a manner of dream-convulsions to portray poor Ti-Jean's mind's eye, and it does so without the finesse that is the Kerouac poise. Yet, this book languishes with an essential truth of Kerouac's own literary epic, offering a chronological statement that cannot be divorced from everything else. Does it condemn fame, love, religion? Does he condemn himself? Instead of pushing for Paradiso, Kerouac takes Dante's slown-train into the depths. Not simply a novel of destruction, this is a novel which wrecks regret, self-criticism, and identity upon the shores of Big Sur. It's importance is its place within the mind of the man who wrote it.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best descriptions of an alcoholic's suffering ...
Review: Nobody but Kerouac could describe the horror and suffering of alcoholism in lyrical, fluent prose. The opening pages show Kerouac's true gift as a writer. I often pick this book up at book stores and re-read the mesmerizing beginning where Jack wakes up 'all woe-begone and goopy' as the church bells play a mournful version of "I'll take you home again, Kathleen". He describes the alcoholic's hangover as the worst experience on earth -- like standing in pork blood as a 'mudman backbent monster' pulling 'a long hot burden to nowhere'. Atute readers will see hints of Jack's descent into depression and alcoholism in his earlier works. In "Big Sur" Jack openly acknowledges the nature of his suffering. Sadly, he would go on to drink himself to death. Kerouac's true gift lies in his original voice as an witer and not in being a joyful icon of the open road. "Big Sur" eloquently shows that the man suffered enormously.
Rating:
Summary: Kerouac's soul painfully exposed
Review: Over the past two weeks I read, as a trilogy of sorts, 'On the Road', 'Dharma Bums' and finally 'Big Sur'. The word that comes nearest to describing 'Sur' is devastating. Kerouac's realization that his past as 'happy poet' was filled with human pride and ignorance of the pain of others ripped my heart out, after my feeling his deep love of life in the two previous books. It's a truism, but as Kerouac himself said, 'truisms are all true', but one can never feel the pain of others, and only through our own pain, can we even begin to touch the feelings of humanity. But in 'Big Sur', one comes close to feeling the grit and sweat and bleeding of Kerouac's soul
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Read
Review: Some of his most beautiful & poetic lyrics in this memoir and at the same time very real, scary and certainly dark in large sections--it's a paranoid view of the world that precedes what the Bay Area has indeed turned into, covering great speedways down the Bay Shore Freeway (280) from Los Gatos and San Jose and up into the City, Frisco and the comercialism and hangers on that delude and ruin every scene, perverted and idealistic, glorious and sorrowful ... and the poetry on the beach is just wonderful, Jack's translations of the Pacific Ocean into the English language.
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