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A review by mattbeatty
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
4.0
I'll admit it, I love Kerouac. Though I hadn't read him in years until this, until recently. It was easy to be reintroduced. His style and casual prosaic gait is inviting. He pulls you along with his thoughts and meanderings--like the creek he loves so much by the cabin--he flows and lulls and ponders with spidery reaching. It's great literary philosophic escape, somehow, listening to all his woes, his financial stability yet yearning to be or experience something else. His disenchantment with the same old scene and then he's sucked right back in.
It seems this must have been cathartic for him. It's as if he were speaking right to you, all his worries and insecurities and often bizarre proposed outcomes, dreams, visions, and so on. All the stories, and characters, the settings themselves are characters--Monterey, Big Sur + and its "Raton Canyon" (really Bixby Canyon), the sea, San Francisco! especially. You're in Jack's circle of friends. You're living his way of life, the beat generation years after beating awake.
"Writing's just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface" (141). He knows it. He maintains his writing style as self-referential, almost a parody of himself. All his purposeful misspelling-shortcuts, lack of punctuation, dashed sentences, one per paragraph.
It's all very raw and presented for you like a mansuscript. I love it.
--- ---
"It always makes me proud to love the world--Hate's so easy compared" (141)
"we're all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom" (179)
"For after all the sea must be like God" (41). -- And there it is folks, Big Sur for your consuming pleasure.
It seems this must have been cathartic for him. It's as if he were speaking right to you, all his worries and insecurities and often bizarre proposed outcomes, dreams, visions, and so on. All the stories, and characters, the settings themselves are characters--Monterey, Big Sur + and its "Raton Canyon" (really Bixby Canyon), the sea, San Francisco! especially. You're in Jack's circle of friends. You're living his way of life, the beat generation years after beating awake.
"Writing's just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface" (141). He knows it. He maintains his writing style as self-referential, almost a parody of himself. All his purposeful misspelling-shortcuts, lack of punctuation, dashed sentences, one per paragraph.
It's all very raw and presented for you like a mansuscript. I love it.
--- ---
"It always makes me proud to love the world--Hate's so easy compared" (141)
"we're all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom" (179)
"For after all the sea must be like God" (41). -- And there it is folks, Big Sur for your consuming pleasure.