Perhaps the pinnacle of JK's writing style...experimental and unique, but not so far out (like, say, Visions of Cody) that it's tough to follow. This captures a few important months in Kerouac's life just as he and his fellows are about to unwittingly hit the big time and beatnik fame. From epiphanies and boredom atop mountains then down into the city of SF, down to Mexico, then up to NYC...a few crazy months that unfold almost in real time. That's how it feels anyway as he goes into the greatest detail about everything he sees, smells, feels and experiences along the way. If nothing else it provides an amazing snapshot of American life at that time and those places.

As always, JK is here in full, warts and all...depression, joy, anxiety, addiction, selfishness, kindness and all the rest. If I hadn't read On The Road and Dharma Bums so many times I might call this my favorite book of his, although it is definitely more melancholy than either of those.

Kerouac is really more of a travel writer than anything. He recalls his travels with buddies, all of them somewhat famous among the beats and all thinly covered with noms deplumes. But the problem with this and so much of his other work -- and I've ready many of his "novels" -- is that his writing philosophy is "first thought best thought;" he never edits or reconsiders removing a boring scene.

And, as this is travel writing, the story is propelled simply by his movement; there's not much plot, no building to a climax. He just comes down from a fire tower, hitches to San Francisco, goes to Mexico, then NYC, yada, yada. What's really amazing about Kerouac is that he was so prolific: many novels during a ten year period commencing in 1957 till his death about a decade later. But, if one doesn't edit or even mull what to include or how to tell the story even, perhaps the productivity isn't a surprise.

So, this book has several compelling scenes, a few disturbing, but it's just that, verbal postcards from a writer who couldn't settle down. But if you're new to him, stick with On the Road and Dharma Bums; much of the rest is simply too weak and lengthy.

My life is a vast insane legend reaching everywhere without beginning or ending... my life is a vast inconsequential epic with a thousand and a million characters.

In which Jack Kerouac writes like 100 pages about sitting alone at the top of a mountain and then devotes all of 3 to his experience visiting Paris for the first time. As it should be.

A disjointed but captivating transitional work with an all-time great title. Kerouac is over the crest of his beatnik idealism displayed so prominently in On the Road and The Dharma Bums, but not yet mired in the bottomless despair that would animate some of his later offerings like Big Sur. Still, the weltschmerz is gnawing away at him bit by bit. “Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?” he asks. There is a subtle metafictional element woven throughout the text as Kerouac reckons with the impact his typing has had upon the culture around him. Anyway, a few other memorable lines:

“All the saints have gone to the grave with the same pout as the murderer and the hater, the dirt doesn’t discriminate, it’ll eat all lips no matter what they did and that’s because nothing matters and we all know it.”

“I look up, there are the stars, just the same, desolation, and the angels below who don’t know they’re angels. And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”

“It’s hard enough to live in a world where you grow old and die, why be dis-harmonious?”

“A peaceful sorrow at home is the best I’ll ever be able to offer the world, in the end.”

And everything is going to the beat. And everything is going to the beat…

I don't know if I'm outgrowing Kerouac, but I definitely got that feeling when I started this book. There's something lacking in exurberance, like Kerouac's winding down.
Solitude Vs Wildness atop Mt Desolation Kerouac enjoys the peace & solitude but as soon as he's back into the fold of Cassady-Cody, Ginsberg-Irwin, Corso-Raphael, Orlovsky-Simon & Burroughs-Bull; he's soon back to his old hoboing, drunken, womanizing ways (which like his other books makes for some exicitng writing) but behind it all Memere's premonition 'They'll destroy you...' is painfully apparent.
Kerouac's Christ/Buddha is no match for this kind of life any more and is slowly disintergrating along his non-stop hipster travails, which take him to Mexico, Tangiers, Paris & London, becoming increasingly bored & disillusioned when confronted with the increasing notority of the 'beat generation' becoming known to all American high school kids, making it the latest fad instead of a free way of life.
Also the guy had a serious complex about women: 'Women scheme for men's babies'!!!??. His woman-hatred stemming from his obsessive relationship; revealed in his numerous lover relationships as a terrified little boy & some twisted garden of Eve shit where all women are evil and gonna eat you, leading to the Freudian theory that he was in fact gay. He even suggests at one point that all he wants to do is crawl back into his mother's womb!
It's a big sticking point but it's my only criticism; this book is no different form his other amazing works,& is argurably refreshing in an over PC society but it does suffer from dating: 'Negro'. The only cringe worthy aspect of Kerouac is his ignorance over race, suggesting all poor black people are jolly happy folk.
The only problem with Beat-Lit is the fact that the men are so weak & stupid; their attitude to women is simply degrading: 'I just wanted them to spread their legs.' e.g. if she sleeps with you she's cool, if she's not interested she's a dike or 'square'.
This blatant sexism & ignorant racism i find bizarre along side their relaxed attitude to homosexuality, and really works out that men can do whatever they want.
But this is only part of Beat, and doesn't detract from his amazing stream-of-conciousness writing style, rushing by as fast as the road, carrying us with it.

I really wanted to like this book. I climbed Desolation Peak, toured the lookout tower, and thought that a gifted writer would be deeply moved by being in the presence of such majestic scenery. Instead, he can’t wait to get off the mountain and spend his existence traveling from city to city, party to party, bar to bar.

I do have some appreciation for the poetic language, the moments of connection to the universe and even the zest for life and people and experiences, but I could only get through a little less than half, when I decided to just skim the rest to see if anything else connected back to his mountaintop experience. Very little did.

Got to page 180, about 20 pages shy of Part 2. I might come back to it again. I might not.

Me, 5 pages in:
"OMG what style!! This is gonna be fun, can't wait to read a whole book written like this!!"

Me, one month and 400 pages later:
"I have never so desired death."

So, how do you judge a book / an author you're enjoying&admire.. only to then come along to the part where Jack, at 34 years old (in 1956), has sex with a 14-year old prositute in Mexico for 24 cents where he purposely chooses the youngest girl the brothel has to offer.

If I'm allowed to sidestep that fact (burned in my memory), it's his best book, as awful as that sounds. Where it begins with his two months of solitude up at Desolation Peak watching for fires, before falling back into society, back to his drinking days, wild nights through California/Mexico/Paris/London with Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, Corso, Watts, Dali, and so many more in the telling of his final days&months before he becomes famous with On the Road on the verge of being published.

But his life, his beliefs, were full of contradictions through his Catholic Buddhist beliefs of being all zen&free, and yet lived a life completely contrary to those he preached. And yet, he knows it, he knows he and his other ragtag beatnik members were full of shit in their cool poetic personas of counterculture.

A lot of people hate his run-on lines, which I hear&understand, but he created stories that truly spoke through his own voice, his own sound, mimicking the spontaneous jazz that he loved so much -- a sporadic scat singing that spoke from his soul of souls. Albeit, a troubled soul, but an honest one at that (even if it didn't always make sense).

Does art lessen because of the artist's questionable morals? Especially when morals and laws in the past were different than now? My opinion of Kerouac is forever scarred.. but he still did have a lot of good things to say:

Hitch hiked a thousand miles
and brought You wine

I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim...

Every night I still ask the Lord, "Why?" and havent heard a decent answer yet

Meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom....

And all you hearts who love life realize now that to love is to love

The moon is a piece of me

The sound of silence is all the instruction you'll get

While meditating, I am Buddha-- Who else?

Hold still man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and simply be--be--be-- the infinite fertilities of the one mind of infinity, making no comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting stars of thoughts, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what is, it is only what it always is -- Hope is a word like a snow drift--This is the Great Knowing, this the Awakening, this is Voidness -- so shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry...

"When a baby is born he falls asleep and dreams the dream of life, when he dies and is buried in his grave he wakes up again to the Eternal Ecstasy"--"And when all is said and done, it doesn't matter."

At dawn I restless wake to see Mount Shasta and old Black Butte, mountains don't amaze me anymore--I don't even look out the window--It's too late, who cares?

Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat.

Part 4, 64 to 72 of Desolation Angels is Jack Kerouac's journey from Florida to Berkeley,CA with his mother. "A relentless hope" is what he describes her and I couldn't agree of a better depiction of every hard working mother out there. It reminded me of my own mother. She passed when I was young and I can go with is bits and pieces of memories of her waking up at 330 in the morning, cooking away in the kitchen for breakfast and packed lunch or ironing our uniforms before the 530am school bus arrives. She is a pillar of strength in my eyes and had a strong will to live for every moment with her family. Reading these exerpts made me miss her a lot. I'm very thankful to read this part of the book a little less than a month before her birthday and anniversary. Thanks Jack.

-sorry this wasn't much of a review

This is the fifth Kerouac book I’ve read and it was the least satisfactory for a number of reasons. Having read four books already and with relative familiarity with the Beat circle, there seems to be a lot of repetition. The first 100 pages at the Desolation Peak was about author’s solitary experience in a more existentialist tone, which was a bit tedious. Kerouac shifts to a much more vivid tone the moment he gets down the Desolation Peak. So for a moment I had difficulty relating the first section to the rest of the book, but by the time I finished I realized that the whole thing was about the sense of belonging to a place and the lack of it at the same time. Beyond this, the Zen references throughout the book was interesting to trace as a foreshadowing of the Hippies growing interest in spirituality and search for alternative values in life. Not my favorite Kerouac read, but several underlined parts to go back to be reread.

I imagine Tom Waits reading Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels when he got inspired to write lyrics for his early albums like Nighthawks At the Diner or Heartattack and Vine. I can also imagine Jim Jarmusch reading this and then hurrying off to make films like Stranger Than Paradise or Down By Law. This is definitely Kerouac at his best.

This novel begins where The Dharma Bums ended, with Jack Duluoz alone on Desolation Peak, employed as a fire lookout for a whole summer. The solitude and boredom begin to eat away at him so he plunges into daydreams and random memories of his past while meditating on the nature of existence. Some of these passages are scattered, some are lucid, some are downright nonsense but in the world of jazz no one asks what Louis Armstrong meant when he sang scat and no one tried to figure out what Charlie Parker meant when blew rapid-fire staccato imrovs on his trumpet. You just listen, feel it, and go with it.

Desolation Angels is as much a work of jazz as it is a work of literature. It is an extended piece of music played through the medium of language. Kerouac works his words into a rhythmic progression and riffs on until he knows, by instinct, when it is time to move on to another mode. The novel really picks up when Duluoz comes down off the mountain. He hitchikes to San Francisco and meets up with his bunch of friends. Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend make appearances thinly disguised as Irwin Gardener and Simon Darlovsky. Greogry Corso shows up as Raphael Urso. Neal Cassady is Cody Pomeray. There are others who can be recognized from previous Kerouac books. William S. Burroughs shows up later when Duluoz travels to Tangiers. The media begins to take notice of the Beat Generation literary scene and this bunch of guys do what they ordinarily do, run around getting drunk, getting high, getting laid, listening to jazz and having some wild conversations that sound like Arthur Rimbaud and Andre Breton arguing about passages from Finnegans Wake.

Desolation Angels is a lot more oriented to the places Duluoz goes to. There is less writing about road trips and more subjective, stream of consciousness thought overlaying everything that takes place in the cities he vists. The narrator tries to see the angelic and lonely side of everyone he encounters and that leads to him drawing some sharp and vivid portraits of a lot of people. Kerouac had a talent for writing quick and easy descriptions of others so they appear just as if you see them in the flesh but he also describes them so you get little glimpses and glimmers of who they are. Those insights are brief but also vivid and easy to relate to. The world Duluoz lives in is one populated by sad and somber people and he truly wants to believe that all of them are good.

A lot of Jack Duluoz’s thought is deep, reflective, meditative, often serious but peppered with bits of humor that tend to be a bit dark. He contemplates a lot on Buddhist philosophy and Christian theology, though neither strain of his spirituality is orthodox. He gives you a mishmash of ideas about the emptiness of existence, the fact that nothing matters in the end because we all die, nothing exists but the Void, being is permeated with nothingness but still God needs to be praised, Jesus needs to be loved, Buddha needs to be learned from, and he tried to fill the blank spaces of life with passion and vivacity. He rebels against the bleak, joyless life of middle, industrial-era America. He brings passion to everything he does and infuses it everywhere he goes. He wants the whole world to vibrate with ecstasy. Duluoz is a hedonist with a gentle nature, a heart of gold, and a mind saturated with combustible bursts of music. He celebrates his status as an outsider, an eccentric, a manic wildman both foolish and wise simultaneously.

Another theme that runs through Desolation Angels is the creeping trendiness of the Beat Generation, or the “Beatniks” as the media so offensively labeled them. As the author starts getting on in years, the younger crew of imitators and wannabes start to get on his nerves. Duluoz and his friends are conscious of their growing celebrity status as well and he wants very little to do with it. In his mid-thirties, Duluoz finds he is not immune to the cycles of life. He gets tired of wandering and rambling and starts to consider settling down. He wants a wife but instead takes his mother from Florida to California to live with him. She enjoys the time they spend in New Orleans and Nogales despite the painfully long crosscountry bus ride but decides she wants to return to Florida after a couple weeks in Berkeley.

Jack Duluoz finds his unconventional lifestyle and undisciplined friends bother his conservative, working-class mother. He does not say it loudly but you can tell he feels hurt by the rejection. He also comments on the unrequited love of his father. It makes me wonder if all the times he insists on shouting out his love to God, if he is, in actuality, trying to fill the void left by his emotionally distant parents. After all, while he puts so much emotion into praising divinity, all he hears is the echo of his own voice. God never responds, there is only silence. In the high-octane, hyperactive madness in Kerouac’s writing there is always a sad undercurrent of solitude and despair. Why else would he abandon himself so maniacally in boozing, partying, and writing books about it all? It’s like he wanted the sanctity of transcendent joy to be imminent so that the vast Buddhist Void or the anxious empty spaces in his mind could be filled.

Desolation Angels is Jack Kerouac’s most fascinating novel. Once the prose begins to flow it never stops. It reads like a hurricane of emotions that sweep the reader in a whirlwind of language and wild emotions. It is also the kind of book you can re-read several times and always discover something new. Kerouac’s writing is so intimate and candid you can feel like you actually know him. There were even times when I felt like his words were coming out of my own head rather than off the page where they actually are. After reading this novel several times, this feeling has grown stronger with age. I tend to avoid religious thought as much as I can but I think if angels existed, Jack Kerouac would have become one, when he died, to watch over us and try to make us feel lively and excited about everything we set out to do.

https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/

This isn't a book for everybody, but indeed there is something about Kerouac's writing that I find so compelling: honesty, and yes even honesty about the emptiness of a life of radical debauchery while reveling in it. He captures the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of the self in a rootless life, or at least an attempt at rootlessness, for Kerouac wasn't entirely rootless. He had Memère.

Jackovo bezútěšné cestování ze štítu zoufalství přes Frisco, Mexico, New York, Afriku, Paříž a Londýn až zpátky domů. Párty s ostatními anděly zoufalství už ho moc neberou a po předávkování opiem v Africe s Burroughsem si uvědomí, že už by chtěl jenom domů do domečku s borovicemi za oknem.

Sex, drogy, jazz a hektolitry chlastu (vína, whiskey a bourbonu), spaní u otevřeného okna nebo na střeše, hlavně aby bylo vidět na hvězdy.

Allen a Peter jsou pořád šťastní ve svým šílenství a Jack čím dál utrápenější. Čím dál míň zenového buddhismu a víc křesťanských pekelných běsů.

Cesta lodí z USA zní jako skvělé dobrodružství (určitě ale jenom teoreticky).

Všichni zapomínáme, že Jack mluvil francouzsky (how hot must have that been!).

Čím dál víc se ztotožňuju se zoufalým Jackem, který už je znechucený z každého nového dobrodružství (a chlastá) než se zamilovaným básníkem Allenem, který si užíval života a cestoval po celém světě. (A to mi není ještě ani 30 a Jackovi nebylo ještě ani 40).

Jak píše o svojí mamince, to by jeden plakal.

Neal prohrává peníze na dostizích, Lucien jenom sprostě pořvává a chlastá a rve Jackovi košile, Peter Orlovsky se vždycky snaží být jako někdo jiný a má příliš mladistvých ideálů, Gregory Corso působí jako totální kokot, který všude jenom vyřvává a je se vším nespokojený a utrácí haldy peněz, které nemá a Burroughs je šílený a vysílený z drog a zapisuje vize, které mu posílají z jiných planet, vypisuje ze sebe všechny hnusy a největší sračky, aby sám sebe očistil.

Stejně mám ale pořád všechny hrozně ráda a baví mě o nich číst, protože jsou teďka už jako moji staří kamarádi, kterým leccos odpustíte. (Jediné co se těžko přehlíží je ta Jackova čtrnáctiletá mexická šlapka, but I guess that was the life in the 50’s.)

Možná tak pít víno někde v lesích za Friscem. Šílené zážitky, které se dobře čtou, ale žít by je fakt nikdo nechtěl.

Hned na začátku Jack dělá stojky na štítu zoufalství stejně jako já doma na koberci.

“seber svou lásku k životu a sejdi z týhle hory a prostě buď - buď - buď vší tou nekonečnou plodností jediné mysli bez konce, nic nekomentuj, neřeš,nekritizuj, nechval, nepřiznávej, nevykládej, nepouštěj myšlenky na špacír, jen plyň, plyň, buď vším a se vším, buď tím, co je, to jediné je totiž navěky -”

“Ubohá lidská srdce tlučou jako o překot všude.”

Jack mluví směsicí francouzskokanadskýho, newyorskýho, bostonskýho a oklahomskýho přízvuku a míchá do toho Espaňol a Plačky nad Finneganem.

“Duše alkohol vůbec nepotřebuje.”

“Konečně jsem se dostal až na dno (údolí).” Hoho.

Jack o sobě mluví jako o čisté, právě rozkvetlé sedmikrásce a rozumí akorát zběsilým šílenostem stejně jako my.

Stejně tak mají uplakané alkoholové dýchánky. Někdo brečí, protože si myslí, že ho praštil Peter Orlovský, i když jenom upadl, a Jack potom brečí, protože si myslí, že Peter někoho praštil.

“Takže Cody je vlastně Průvodčí nebeskýho vlaku a jednou proštípne jízdenky nám všem,...”

“Koneckonců, jediný důvod, proč žít nebo proč vyprávět příběh, je otázka “Co bude dál?”

Sjetí opiem: “Všimni si, jak jemňoučkej stín mají kytky pod tím stromem.”