Jack Kerouac openly recounts a difficult period of his life, in which he falls into alcoholism, breaking away from the usual romanticism of the Beat Generation. The fame that came on the wave of success from his previous books, instead of bringing joy, weighs on him and leads to an inner crisis. He reveals his inner experiences as he sinks deeper into severe alcohol-induced despair. The book is especially interesting when read after The Dharma Bums and On the Road — it's like the completion of a trilogy. However, it's unfortunate that familiar characters, based on real people, are once again presented under fictional names. Big Sur contrasts the initial joy and euphoria of his earlier works with a stark portrayal of depression.

The main strength of the book is its sincerity. Kerouac effectively conveys how he steadily descends into a "dark cosmos," losing his sanity and tormenting everyone around him. His reflections on life and fame add depth to the novel and make the reader ponder.

Overall, Big Sur is an important, though challenging, work by Kerouac. It honestly showcases his personal problems and the price he paid. The novel offers a valuable, albeit bleak, insight into the consequences of the relentless pursuit of complete freedom.

I missed his novel "On the road" a few years ago, perhaps because I was expecting something else. I did not fully understand this madness; their philosophy was to live the moment by burning the wings but devouring everything until self-destruction. But, of course, the ardor of youth does not make people realize that excess is dangerous—quite the contrary.
In Big Sur, Kerouac realizes he has already gone too far in his dissolute life. The worst part is that, ultimately, success and this beatnik madness will be a curse he cannot manage because they sink more profoundly and more than ever; he is prey to his old demons.
He is surrounded but ultimately alone, profoundly alone.
It is a moving book. The reader is powerless and finally witnesses real perdition.

Catching up…

Living where I do, not too far off of Hwy 1, on the beautiful Central Coast of California, I am fortunate to see the ocean as part of my every day walks with my husband and corgi dogs. I know how lucky I am as I take in sounds of the waves crashing onto the sand, or feeling my feet in the water, or watching the tide recede, and/or listening to the noises of the birds as they fly overhead. And that is just a moment. There are so many more.

So, years ago, when a friend suggested I read this book, it wasn’t too hard to consider, since Big Sur was a place I remember we went to as a family when I was young, and then again after I got married.

At the time, I didn’t realize what I was getting in to when I opened the pages. And as I re-visit this story again, I am reminded of this heart-ache again.

This is a story about place. The place being a cabin in Big Sur. As well as Big Sur itself. But place is just a side character. The unfortunate part are the players (the characters) that occupy the place. They are sadly messed up.

Why? Well, in a nutshell, this novel is about the effects that alcohol has on the body and soul. Binges. Disconnected from reality…especially from the beauty of the landscape, the beautiful California coast line…Big Sur that lays before the central character.

Could a redemption be forthcoming? Is the author unknowingly telling a biographical story of himself?

If nothing else, this book was an important biographical touchstone of a life of an artist possessed. It showed his sensitivity, insecurities, recklessness, low self-esteem, need for solitude, even a hatred for solitude (obvious complexities), deep depression caused by chemical indulgences. This is the books story, but clearly, we can also see it as the story of the author, too.

It appears that art converged into life, and then sadly life left him.

This book was published in 1962. Kerouac died in 1969 of an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking.

Last note…I almost gave up on finishing this book originally, because I don’t like reading books about characters that self-destruct.

But...In the world of literature, we may encounter characters whose authors reflect their own personal demons. With their story, we find vulnerabilities and creative endeavors. And an opportunity to appreciate that maybe their legacy can be a beacon, guiding us toward understanding, of their personal experience. And, we can honor their memory by embracing the imperfections and art that speaks to the human condition.

I think this is Kerouac's most honest work. On the Road is awesome and I love it's exuberance for life and experience, but it's ultimately a book of youth- all go go go without a thought or consideration of others or consequences. that's fine when you're 25, 26, 27... but as I've gotten older, I've come to regard On the Road as somewhat "blind" exuberance... and Big Sur is the cliff that Kerouac jumps right off full speed with his eyes open. Big Sur is a crack-up book and it shows how Kerouac lost his mind to alcohol. In this book, Kerouac describes his regimin of drinking in painful detail, and still manages to sound somewhat go go go ish in boyish On the Road terms. Jack never grew up, as we can see by the unconvincing ending to this book- all hell and horror falling apart and then- Bam! Everything is Fine... right. Kerouac would die a few years later from an abdominal hemmorage caused by gut rot from too much wine. He documented his horror, but couldn't escape.

Kerouac is a paradox. He's simultaneously over-rated and under-rated. His worst books (particularly On the Road) are iconic and uncritically adored by teenagers and hippy-dippy morons, while his best works are overlooked.

Big Sur ranks among his best. It's Kerouac at his lowest, having been devoured by fame and digested by the vast chasm that lies between the saint he's imagined to be and the bitter, depressed, exiled, alcoholic that he really is.

Kerouac is astoundingly frank in describing his desperate attempt to deal with what he's become and to somehow reconnect with the wonder that inspired him a mere decade earlier. It's a picture of a man at odds with his iconic status. It's in direct opposition to so much of his early work that sees holiness and bliss lurking everywhere, including the gutter. And the ending, an onamonapoetic ode to the roaring coast of Big Sur, is a vision of destruction and restoration rolled into one.

Kerouac's Book Of Interior Chaos

Kerouac's novel "Big Sur" (1962) is a painful, self-lacerating portrayal of the writer's deterioration and nervous breakdown from alcoholism and a look back at the better days and friendships recounted in "On the Road". "The circles close in on the old heroes of the night", the narrator, Jack Duluoz, says as he visits Neal Cassady (Cody). The characters in the novel are thinly-disguised friends of Kerouac's from San Francisco's bohemian literary community of the 1950s.

The book's setting during August -- September, 1960 alternates between a remote cabin in California's Big Sur and the lively streets and bars of San Francisco. Kerouac could never decide where he wanted to be and was unable to be happy either alone or with others for long. Kerouac, exhausted by the publicity he received after "On the Road" and increasingly dependent on alcohol, accepts the offer of a friend to stay at his Big Sur cabin and recover his strength. While Kerouac responds to the wild beauty of the scenery, he also is frightened for himself. He writes the book looking back to the events and often addresses the reader directly about the breakdown that will occur at the book's end.

After three weeks, Kerouac finds he cannot bear the loneliness at Big Sur and tries to hitchhike to Monterrey. When he cannot thumb a ride, he realizes that America has changed from his younger days. Jack has a reunion with Cody, who has just been released from two years in jail for possession and with his wife Evelyn when he reaches San Francisco. He is devastated upon learning that his pet cat has died and returns to heavy drinking with his friends. Thoughts and dreams of the death of cats, mice, otters, snakes, fish, and people pervade the narrator's mind. The book zig-zags back to Big Sur, where the narrator comes close to a breakdown and back to San Francisco, where Cody fixes up Jack for what will be a tumultuous relationship with one of Cody's mistresses, Billie, who has a four year old son, Elliott. They are together for a week, before Jack feels hemmed in. Jack, Billie, Elliott and another couple return to Big Sur for the third time where on a chilly September evening, Jack goes mad from delirium tremens in a vividly and frighteningly realistically described scene.

"Big Sur" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style with its lengthy stream-of consciousness sentences and paragraphs. With all his difficulties with alcoholism and breakdowns, the writing is convincing and often beautiful. Even the long, rambling poem written at Big Sur that concludes the book effectively shows the author's mental state. The book is also well-organized as its story develops clearly and inexorably. From the opening pages, the reader is left in no doubt of direction of the book and of its catastrophic confusion. The book has many descriptive passages and discussions of literature, Buddhism, nature, and of the narrator's dreams juxtaposed against the harsher reality of alcoholic deterioration. In an early passage, the narrator describes delirium tremens as follows:

"But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility -- The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness -- You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word.... "

The narrator shows self-pity as he tells his story, but most of the time he makes a painful attempt to be honest and to describe his life and his failures to live up to his dreams -- particularly his alcoholism, self-centeredness, inability to find peace, and inability to establish a lasting relationship with a woman. The book offers a harsh but moving self-portrayal of the author in his latter years who has lost his way.

"Big Sur" is one of Kerouac's better books and will interest readers who know "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" or "Tristessa". In 2013, Michael Polish directed and wrote the screenplay for a flim version of "Big Sur" which is worth seeing but does not capture the anguish of the novel. The title of this review, "Kerouac's Book of Interior Chaos" is taken from William Everson's book "Birth of a Poet" as used in Tom Clark's biography of Kerouac.

Robin Friedman

Forgive me for this ramble in the kinda sorta manner of. . .

ohmygodno I did not want to read this book right now, I really did not. I am in the middle of reading the later books of the recently departed Philip Roth, unflinchingly facing decay and death, and I had to drive a few hours in a car and I am about to head west On The Road soon and so I wanted to set myself up not with a framework of aging but a sense of eternal youth of joie de vivre of zest for life and go west young man, I was looking for Dharma Bums, and yikes oh no I stumbled into the sad beat drunken Breton the delirium tremens dream of Big Sur, which I had read first at maybe twenty within a year of the time I also read another alcohol-ravaged book of self-destruction, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. Oh, I so needed Dharma Bums and got Big Sur oh god no, oops! so sad and hard to read, but finally, it has searing passages, even you Kerouac haters would have to admit are painfully powerful. Jumpin’ Jack Splash! In the ocean, the sea, whee.

Kerouac here is stream-of-consciousness and it’s a tale of two Big Surs, one he encounters alone and idyllic and writing every day and dry (that is, alcohol-free) in a friend’s cabin, a kind of fast-typed journal of peacefulness that he needs because ten years ago he was On the Road with Dean Moriarty/Cody which became a beatnik anthem for a nation of young romantics and then Jack kept drinking and Dean got thrown in jail and Jack became surrounded by a thousand or five sycophants and young guys in Dharma Bums t shirts knocking on his door to get drunk with him, and he most often agreed, though by the time of this book he felt it was a lie and a cheat to imagine that the road he personally had taken would lead to anything but ruin.

In the second section of Big Sur we experience a horrifically precise description of the alcoholic delirium tremens that he encountered on the path to his death from booze. Page after page of fighting sweet Billy, the sweet beatnik/hippie girl who only wants to heal him with love, and paranoid/psychotic hallucinations enough to swear most people off booze for at least a couple days. In the end Jack returns sadly and brokenly home to his mother.

It is tempting, if you hate On the Road and beatniks and hippies and the whole romantic period extending from the late fifties til the early seventies, to think of Big Sur as the fitting and I-told-u-so Kerouac bookend to On the Road, the pay the piper yang to the Woodstock escapist ying of those days. But this is Kerouac’s anguished tale of his own life and not a tale of a lost generation (though to read it back to back with The Sun Also Rises would be interesting, and damned depressing). Big Sur is a writer's addiction memoir, not cultural history. Kerouac names his own condition madness, but it is really just a clinical condition almost no one around helps him with, and most just "enable" him by bringing him booze--alcoholism--and boom he is dead at 47.

The book concludes with the poem “Sea” that he wrote in his dry idyllic month alone at Big Sur, and is intended as a hopeful coda, maybe. I wish I could say what his friend Allen Ginsburg says of it, “at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.” I like the sweet gesture of the poem there at the end, but I never liked Kerouac’s poetry and it only feels sadder knowing what The Road led him to. I didn’t "enjoy" this book, and some of the writing is just automatic writing, hot or miss, but much of it is powerful and scary and I admire his courage in facing the demons and writing it down. Hmm, now where is Dharma Bums and that old On the Road t-shirt?

Reading this, I can't help but think how much I like Jack Kerouac the person so much more than Jack Kerouac the writer. I know he didn't have a recording device, but it reads like the book is a recorded transcript of his unedited thoughts. Whatever comes out. Making more of a Big Sur Diary than a Big Sur novel.

As you read, you see it's later in his career. He references the 10 "novels" he's already written, that he is "famous," that too many people are hectoring him and lining up to be beatnik wannabes. Tired of his reputation and fame, he flees, but you can't just shake stuff like that.

Most memorable in this book? All the drinking. The strength lies in Kerouac's ability to show us the trap of alcoholism. Nobody likes hanging around an alcoholic, and that's just what we're forced to do reading this. Only it's all on paper vs. real life, so our sympathy is inspired. We feel sorry for the guy. We also know what he doesn't: that he'll be dead at the ridiculous age of 47 thanks to the poison of alcohol. Jack worried too much about killing fish and mice and too little about killing himself.

Holyshit why isn't this as highly acclaimed as on the road? Granted i never actually read on the road but like i know it so much because well, lit nerd things
But this? IS SO GOOD
i was going insane reading it. every goddamn conversation was food for thought. definitely would recommend.

دیگه هیچ‌گاه کتابی با ترجمه‌ و یا قلم فرید قدمی نخواهم خواند.

This was a blast to listen to, just enjoyed the performance.
I wish I could say something smart about the content but it wasn't that kind of experience.

3,5
A nap solves everything