Cities of the Red Night : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: For Burroughs, everything goes...
Review: To say that Burroughs' novels tend to be repetitive is to be at once obvious and obscure. The cut-up method is used to great and sometimes subtle effect. A single "character" appears and dissapears, then reappears as someone else (in a different body, time, state, context). If there are a limited number of myths and stories, they have all collapsed here in the sink of Burroughs' storytelling. A single myth explodes and collapses in on itself, overlapping and smashing it's own realities together. It is as if time stops expressing itself on a continuum, and tries to capture its entire span in a single moment. "everything is permitted, everything is real."

Rating:
Summary: The Beginning Of Time
Review: While not nearly as engaging as Exterminator! or Naked Lunch, this shows an epic quality to his style and a tie-in centered around some ancient myth of the time before time, (when the world was advanced enough to cause its own demise) and using it as plot points for the strange tales evoked; from guerilla uprisings to life as it once was, to the pandemonium of the future. Fantastic introduction, calling on mythical demons and whatnot. Recollecting the events is, of course, foggy and chopped into so many fragments of absolute brilliance in hindsight; however not quite on top of his game.

Rating:
Summary: Not a novel
Review: Why this work (along with others of William S. Burroughs) is called a "novel", beats me. William S. Burroughs has a dazzling and weird imagination, but totally unorganized. He's totally unwilling or unable to narrate a story, weave a plot, bring it to a conclusion. All the story lines lose themselves somewhere between the Caribbean and the Gobi Desert, leaving the reader none the wiser. The Author's obsession for erotic hanging verging on necrophilia didn't help making me appreciate the book.
Read Lethem, Storm Constantine, Neil Gaiman instead. They write REAL novels, and very good too!


Rating:
Summary: Starts off great....Then Plummets.............
Review: Yes, here we trip through a group of 1700's pirates cruising the sea, and at first really enjoying the waves, the comradeship, the nature, the heavens, and just about anything else one may enjoy on such a trip..It is a nice hallucinatory, semi sci-fi trip until it...frankly goes from the dreamlike to the grotesque to the ...well, let's just say scatalogical, to keep it simple. No doubt this odd fellow could write, but whether you want to share his truly bizarre daydreams is problematic, to be kind. Sure, he was in the same crowd as Kerouac, but universes apart! Read all of Jack K. before tripping into Burroughs!