Rating: 
Summary: Sad Book
Review: This book is very sad, yet beautiful. It tells the autobiographical story of Jack Kerouac, who is now forty years old, famous for writing On the Road, and has a problem with alcohol.
Jack in this book, feels he is on the brink of madness. He has a hard time accepting the negative forces in life, such as death, and other people's insanity. He is much too sensitive for the world the way it is. He is a man who loves animals, feels a strong tie to his family, and saves insects. He also loves people very much.
This novel almost seems like a horror novel in the parts where Jack describes his mental anguish. He never wanted to be famous, to be the 'king of the beats' and all he wants is some peace of mind, yet he has people following him around all the time. Even the atmosphere at Big Sur becomes oppressive.
The writing is beautiful and poetic, and hauntingly honest. The book ends with a poem echoing the sounds of the sea at Big Sur.
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: 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.
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: 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: 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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