Rating: 
Summary: Breakthrough in Tangiers
Review: There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it. That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader. So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge). Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century. The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end. A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.
Rating:
Summary: A Counterculture Literary Classic: Essential Burroughs
Review: What else can I say, other than that this is "the" book that has brought William S. Burroughs the most fame(infamy?) and glory. Most people interested in Beat Literature choose Kerouac for insight, but I feel that Burroughs gets to the root of the Beatniks' most defining element: Drug use/abuse. His style is unrelenting. His prose harsh and ragged, not unlike himslef for some 15 odd years of his life in which he lived as a junky. I urge the reader to not read this book in sequence from beginning to end as a traditional novel. Instead, read a chapter or two at a time. Then, set it down and leave it alone for a day. The next day, return and continue reading. Each pargraph; each page is a message unto itself. Burroughs uses a rehab center in a place called Interzone, the character William Lee, and a sadistic orgy to help convey the over-all idea that the junky is a sad and tragic individual. But, what makes the junky so tragic is not his position in life. It is the sad fact that he put himself there in the first place. And, to spite himself, the junky's body must continue this act even though his mind says no. It is sad that this book has not been given the credit that it is due. Only at the end of his life did Mr. Burroughs begin to reap the rewards of his, and his comrades' work. As though he couldn't stand another minute in the world of the straight and narrow without a friend(Allen Ginsberg, the last Beat), he died after a life of extreme hardships and bittersweet success. Needless to say, this book sums up Burroughs' early life on the streets before any real intimations of success. It is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those of you who prefer "popular" literature. It is for those of us who seek the truth, and read books about certain topics for an element of reality.
Rating: 
Summary: The emperor has no clothes
Review: Look, either you hate this book or you love it. Burroughs didn't set out to write a classic or make art, he had no choice whatsoevever, he just had to write this down. OK there is no story but so what? A writer/artist should try to express himself not try to write the next classic. This book isn't a scam or a sick joke, it's a man's heart bleeding vitriol. There is no purer book than this, it conceals nothing, it pretents nothing, it's a naked lunch, everybody gets to see what's on the end of their fork. While other writers make use of great stories and plots to cover up the fact that they've got nothing original to say, Bill just spits it at you. The emperor has no clothes? That's because he shed them, they were too constricting.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring
Review: Oh, I forget how i heard of this, i think it was the simpsons episode where milhouse bart and nelson ride across country in a stolen car--they saw a movie, naked lunch, and said, "i can think of two things wrong with that title... my sister didnt want me to read it. neither did my mom. and i'm 22! so, i bought it, read a couple pages, and gave up on it. returned it to the bookstore. a year later i somehow got interested in it again, thought id give it a second chance. i read about half way, and couldnt remember what i read. then a month later, i said, 'andy, youre going to read it all the way!' and i did. it takes a couple stabs at it 'cause its so fast paced and jumps all over the place but is so fresh and exciting to read. im not gay or anything but its obvious he loves men, and writes about it savagely, but there is something cool about it. i liked it the third time. i can only imagine what was going through librarians heads in 1959. 'Oh my god! this is insanity! burn it, burn it all!" read it, if you dare. its a book one must read i think, so, go buy it now! ps) just read the info on the book to see how the style and other things about the book itself...
Rating:
Summary: what nightmares are made of
Review: i see how some people fail to understand why Naked Lunch is indeed one of the greatest books of this century - the first contact with it leaves you shocked, disoriented. There is no real storyline one could easily explain, nor are the characters defined - Burroughs instead creates atmosphere, litle bits of subreality, and ends up with a world that is in a way more real than it oughta be - he is not afraid of loading it with an oddball mix of tiny stories, poems, events, descriptions and dialogues that dont have much to do with the 'main' story - as long as it's one huge nightmare, he keeps pushing it - and you simply have to enjoy it, even if you cant really tell why. Take a stab at this great book! Special thanks, too, to the guy who recommended that book by richard perez -- The Losers Club, maybe the best recommendation i've had in months.
Rating:
Summary: Knowing the score
Review: You don't need me to tell you this is a great book. Writing has never been this good. But are you ready for it? The images are out there. The style is out there. If you haven't been out there with Burroughs, you may want to start with a similar message in a more traditional form, namely his trilogy that begins with "Cities of the Red Night". But the power is here in this book. The power of the truths about control, about desperate needs, about everything that is lurking beneath even well-structure, settled lives. If you're studious, then after the thrill of Naked Lunch, if there is an "after Naked Lunch", you can grow your understanding of your social conditioning with Peter Handke's play "Kaspar" and with B.F.Skinner's study "Verbal Behavior" (read Skinner's "Science and Human Behavior" before "Verbal Behavior"). These are all you need to be able to stand on your own two feet. But start with Naked Lunch to get the jolt you'll need to start understanding how the control systems have you pinned down. Heroin addiction and outlandish sex are only small adornments in "Naked Lunch", the escapes could have been instead workaholism and fundamentalism, or reading books and writing Amazon reviews. But you probably wouldn't be drawn to a book about Amazon book reviewers. Still, Naked Lunch isn't describing anything far away. It's not "out there" after all but right in our guts. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Disgusting... But you have to read it.
Review: This book made me sick. It took me ages to read it, because I had to keep putting it down. But that's the beauty of it: the ramblings of a junky have never seemed more real nor more potent. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: A Journey Into The Unknown -- What Could Be Better?
Review: This is the one book that stretches the definitions of just about every classification ever made about it. Although it contains a whole lot of fiction (people turn into centipedes, scorpions, oozing masses of ectoplasm, etc.), it contains just as much stuff from William S. Burroughs' real life. However, he manages to blend all of it together in such a way that you can't tell just what's going on until about 50 pages into the book.
It's certainly a daunting task trying to separate the wheat from the chaff the first time that you read it, but about halfway through, you start to understand Burroughs' bizarre sense of black humor, and you can begin to laugh at things like Steely Dan (a strap-on used by a characters girl-friend to... uh... bugger him) and A.J.'s various exploits (bringing a baboon into a bar, but trying to pass it off as a poodle). However, this book is not for everyone. If you are uncomfortable with things like frank depictions of the effects diseases (real and imagined), gay sex, and drug use by just about everyone from politicians to doctors (during surgery), then this book will send you screaming from the library. On the other hand, if those things don't bother you, this could easily become your favorite book of all time. Along with NAKED LUNCH, I'd like to recommend THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. Thanks to the previous reviewer who recommended it.
Rating:
Summary: yep, that about sums it up.
Review: Whatever your favorite taboo, you are sure to find it here. Burroughs' work is amazing, from its utter disregard of the rules (pick a rule, any rule - lit laws, societal structure, the sciences - he broke them all) to its poetic quality and clarity. Yes, clarity. Doesn't matter who you are (reader, writer, artist, freaknik, beatnik, poet, politician, anthropologist, sociologist, literary deconstructionist etc...) you ought to grab yourself a copy of this one. And when you're done with it, force it on someone else. And don't skip Ginsberg's testimonial at the beginning. It's there for a reason.
Rating:
Summary: Literature that Assaults All the Senses
Review: Not only can you see the words, but you can smell paragraphs, feel the sentences and taste the chapters. William S. Burroughs has managed to cheat the structure of the English language by flat-out denying the existence of orthodoxy, tradition, convention, rules, principles and standards to deliver a fresh 1950s account of what it is to be a free person, although albeit with the paradox of equally being hooked on every conceivable vice. Burroughs treats character development, plot and structure as mere formalities that have no place on the page. To him the essence of writing is to convey an idea of an experience by any means necessary. This is inclusive of coining new words, new grammar and new syntax as long it gets the message across. In many ways Burroughs achieves the expression of his deranged take on the human condition, and the inhuman one, by simply never coming to terms with life as anything more than psychotic mayhem with the assumption that being "correct" is with population numbers that concur with one another on the trivial points of livelihood. To him it is all pandemonium whatever way you try to cook it and since disorder and chaos are the meal of day why not just dine on it like a King's banquet. The premise here is non-existent. It simply delves into some sort of a junkie come spy come homosexual cover operative who travels to a place called the Interzone to write daily reports of his experiences there. The narrative is fresh, bold, thoroughly unique and actually interesting. It is inspiring but any attempt at trying to do a genre like it can only be seen as plagiarism. Not only has Burroughs cornered his market here, but he owns it through and through. There is nothing else like Naked Lunch and there probably never will be. This book was so shocking when first published that it was tried under obscenity laws. By today's standards the work is quite heartening but is still thoroughly deranged material. It is evil because it is destabilizing on the reader who is brought to a resounding crunch as their mind leaves all rational thought behind. At that moment anything can happen. Let's just hope that the reader can tell the difference between fiction and fantasy before it is too late. One might just get up in the morning and accidentally collapse the economy by huddling in the corner of the room with a grimace on their face and soiled undergarments. The men in white coats will come to get you when the neighbours complain of the smell...
|
