Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating insight into a beat icon
Review: This is among the best of Kerouac's works, revealing the competing world views of the beat rebels. Tristessa is a Mexico City junkie whom Kerouac loves; a junkie he sees in the Buddhist light "life is suffering." The book opens in her home - a hovel in disarray populated by chickens, dog, junkies, an altar to Our Lady, and a dove. It ends with the recognition that only fellow junkies can truly understand another junky - that a vagabond, drunk artist may depict and love but never truly understand.The book's strength is in the passages that reflect most directly the author's mental life - coherent or incoherent - and the role of Buddhism and Catholicism in that mental life. The book also has a secondary strength of providing insight into the beatniks' rebellion - the shape in took in those who, like Kerouac, seem never to have found a peaceful relationship to the world (in conparison to Gary Synder or Phillip Whalen, for example). Not a book destined to be "top ten of the century", but an interesting read.
Rating: 
Summary: On Tristessa
Review: Well, Jack Kerouac does it again with his beautifully melancholic, poetic prose. His descriptions of something as simple as the floor where he stays is enough to draw tears. His wonderfully drug-induced rantings of the beauty of "morphina" and the Virgin Mary Statuette are emotionally charged enough to make anyone a spiritual drug-addicted Buddhist with Catholic images and intense philosophical thought. Definitely worth reading.
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