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Summary: ART IS FREEDOM
Review: this book was a total heroin shot in the whole literature world, it turned it all upside down. kafka, dadaism, surrealism its all there . i really started to write after rereading it.
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Summary: stand-up for pseudo intellectuals
Review: Not really a work of literature, but a glorified transcript of pseudo intellectual stand-up comedy. The material is much more successful when delivered by the author on a spoken word CD.
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Summary: One of my favorite books...
Review: This has got to be one of my favourite books. I was expecting something twisted and it didn't dissapoint. In fact, the book is admirable for it's lack of "decency and good honest work ethic." Isn't that why someone would read a book like this? I don't think I've ever come across a more honest book. As a hetero male, I found this book particularily interesting. It's probably the first book I've read written by a homosexual author who actually deals with the subject in a satirical light. The part about A.J. just kills me and I find myself constantly returning to the pages that "describe" him. In this day and age, I think it's important to read books as $&%*ed up as this one. Everything is sooo normal and boring in the nineties. In fact I'm surprised that literature has even survived. This book screams "art." Yet, if you read it with an open mind, it's completely accessible. Some people expressed surprise when I told them that I had read "Naked Lunch." Apparently it's one of those works, like Joyce's "Ulysses," that most people claim to have read, but few have actually finished.
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Summary: A retrospective:
Review: Naked Lunch is, for better or worse, the key to most people's experience of Burroughs' writing. And they either love it or hate it. Most people I talk to say they couldn't get through it, and this is easy to understand. What is it about this book that people keep talking about it?So NL was/is a revolutionary book, and reading it for the first time can be a fireworks experience. At the same time it must be admited that the writing is uneven - since everything was so new, he and his fellow editors could hardly tell what to keep and what to discard. NL is like visiting a genetics lab before they've had a chance to throw out all the failures. Naked Lunch is a record of a Burroughs' writing break-through. He started trying to write another Junky (see NL's first chapter) and ends up trying to destroy language (the cut-ups he slips into the end of the book - contrary to common belief, NL is not a "cut-up" book in the sense of the technique Burroughs later employed). My own advice to first-time readers is to skip or skim the first chapter, which drags and creates a wrong impression of the rest of the book. Thereafter you should read as the mood takes you, receiving the writing as a series of darkly-humorous skits, lectures and moods. It's perfectly valid to just dip into the book anywhere, and read for as long as the mood holds you. The structure Burroughs' originally planned for this book was disposed of in the final edit, and the published version is almost completely random. The book may also be a little disconcerting because of its period - a lot of the satires and characters relate specifically to the repressive USA of the late 1950's, and many of these archetypes are now extinct. Finally, it's important to remember what came after the revolution - Naked Lunch was only the beginning. The 1960's saw his strangest period - the "cut-ups" - when he pursued his destructive/creative technique as a philosophy, and pushed it beyond all rational limits. The 1970's and 80's saw another revolution - the return to narrative, in a distinctly Burroughs way, and a refinement and enrichment of his style. Some would consider his finest writing to be in these later works.
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Summary: It's not just you...
Review: Don't worry if you feel like your watching a foreign film in a language you don't speak, with a hidden plot. However, I don't think the plot is the essential element to this work: it is the characters. Even if you don't have a clue to what's going on, sit back and enjoy the variety of rich, complex characters that Naked Lunch has to offer.
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Summary: What an interesting book
Review: I was searching for this book for over a year.!! I finally found it and read it. While not sure exactly what it was about I was overwhelmed by how great it was. I brought it to school and they took it away because they found it "inappropriate" how outrageous is that??? So go try and find this book. My advice is to order it from amazon cause I sure had a hard tmie finding it.
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Summary: Naked Lunch: The Ghost of a genius
Review: In my opinion, Naked Lunch was a phenomonal book that introduced me to one of the most talented American authors. William S Burroughs brought into clear view the workings and frailties of a heroin soaked mind. In my opinion, the greatest tragedy in this book has to be the book itself. I would best describe this book as looking into a ghost. With a ghost, you see everything, but it is only a sparse outline of what was, or in this case, what could have been. Burroughs' true talents were indefinitely damaged by his addiction, as was noted by Norman Mailer in the court transcripts in the beginning of this book. As frank and explicit as this book was, it only served as a shroud to the ghost of his genius.
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Summary: Mr. Burroughs is not merely a writer, he is an artist.
Review: To fully understand Mr. Burroughs' novels (especially this one) the reader must be completely honest with themselves- attempt to remove conditioning from their internal mental processes and permit their mind to wander through the artist's world of naked reality... one finds their own relative space within such a raw painting of existence- standing naked with Mr. Burroughs confronted by the complexities of humanity interacting according to some notion of society.
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Summary: The lips of madness kissed werent ever so sweet
Review: Finally there is an epic which promulgates the desperations of the modern world. Where many others have attempted, Burroughs succeeds. America is decadent, America is lost, America is buried beneath its own perverted morality. Burroughs weeps all of this into his drunken page, the lonliness, the agony, the miscalibration of man with morality, as well as the colapse and death of fundamental humanity in this disjointed and mournful elegy to ourselves. If only Americans could appreciate their mirror, William S. Burroughs, I offer you a single rose for truth,and a single tear for the blood you used to inscribe this American epic...Burroughs is a modernized Homer
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Summary: Read "junky" and "queer" before this!!
Review: If you read those two books, This book still wont make any sense. But you will have a better feel for it.
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