I liked this one. Better than Tristessa, at least.

The experience of reading deeper into Kerouac’s catalog than OTR is strange, ironic, absurd. These little books are so sad. The distance between the high wire prose style and the actual content is downright bizarre: this is essentially a book about Kerouac getting drunk with a bunch of his boys in SF, trying to maintain a relationship with a woman that he treats like shit. It doesn’t go well, obviously.

If the book feels like your drunk friend blathering on to you about some half-remembered half-tragedy, half-comedy, that’s intentional. The book was written in three days. That’s harder than it looks, but it does leave you questioning how the form meets the function. I always thought Kerouac’s books would be about Important Topics For Your Consideration. Turns out I was mistaken, but there’s something deeply human and relatable about what they actually are.

The racial politics of the book are difficult, and likely were then as well, if for different reasons.

دومین کتابی بود که از جک کروآک خواندم و از آنجایی که دیوانهٔ کتاب اول یعنی «ولگرد‌های دارما» شدم پس طبیعی است که این را با آن مقایسه کنم!

ولگردهای دارما امضای کروآک است. اصلاً خود کروآک است! همه‌ی چیزهایی را دارد که منحصر به خودش است و با آنها شناخته می‌شود: قلم زنده و پویا، توصیفات و فضاسازی محیطی محشر، روند سریع و هیجان‌انگیز، پُرچانگی خاصی که در ابراز عقایدش دارد و از ده‌ها کتاب و نویسنده و موزیسین و فلان چیزهای جورواجور نام می‌برد و مجبورت می‌کند پشت‌هم در نت سرچ بزنی!

اما خیالتان را راحت کنم. در «زیرزمینی‌ها» خبری از هیچکدام اینها نیست. خبری از کروآک نیست.
ناگفته نماند که ترجمهٔ کتاب را هم دوست نداشتم و بنظرم کیفیت متوسط حتی ضعیفی داشت. شاید اگر فرید قدمی (با وجود ارادتی که به نسل بیت دارد و ثابت کرده ترجمهٔ آثار کروآک و دیوانه‌های بیت کار خودش است!) ترجمه کرده بود، نمرهٔ بیشتری به کتاب می‌دادم.

I am occasionally dizzied or nauseated by the oddest things. Knitting with black yarn, for instance, or the novel "Nausea," of which I could not pass two pages. My reason for getting queasy with this novel, however, requires no exotic explanation. Poor grammar! Perhaps it could be mistaken for poetry in prose. A whirlwind of ideas, a maelstrom of images rushing towards the reader to allow him or her to experience the narrator's emotions and reactions. This approach may have worked, had these emotions and reactions been beyond the superficial. None of the characters seemed motivated by anything beyond sex; it was, in fact, dubitable if even sex motivated them. Had Kerouac written an account of how they lost their toothbrush and found it fallen off the sink, it could hardly be less interesting. We got no sense of what makes the "subterranean" characters themselves; they were just shadowy shapes with alcohol problems. I am not sure where Kerouac wished to go with this book; I am not even sure if he went there. In grammar, plot, and narrative, it was deficient, and dare I say it? Extraordinarily dull.

Entre pausas (de otros dos libros por párrafo) logré completar esta obra. No me gustó, sin embargo reconozco su valor como una buena crónica de la generación beat en su apogeo, una especie de autobiografía de Kerouac (sus roces con otros escritores que "sí llegaron a la fama rápidamente"), y una historia de amor (¿Bizarra? ¿Inusual? ¿O como cualquier otra?) que termina poniendo al protagonista en la friendzone, O Discordia.

Tanta borrachera me hizo odiar mi gusto por una buena cerveza de vez en cuando, pues temo que terminaré así, como un vil subterráneo que a veces es difícil distinguir la muy fina y frágil linea entre un subterráneo y un hipster (con eso de que consideran a un vegano como hipster automáticamente). Carajo.

Y creo entender por qué le ha gustado a mi amigo Miguel Soto, siendo él psicoanalista. Creo. No me hagan caso, soy un simple mortal.

A já jdu domů, když jsem ztratil její lásku.
A píšu tuhle knihu.

Číst ji před lety, nejspíš ji ani nedočtu. Ten tok myšlenek, styl a vyprávění by mi bylo cizí. Ale když člověk ve svém životě prožije lásku, skutečnou lásku, změní se mu dosti náhled na svět a mnohé věci, které se mu zdály býti nesmyslné, najednou dávají smysl. A tak i já propadl tomu kouzlu Kerouaca a tomu hlubokému vyprávění, které tam mnoho lidí ani nenajde, ale až prožití opravdu hlubokého citu otevře některé další dveře a asi ještě víc, když jsou sdílené ve svém konci. A číst všechny ty řádky nadechnuté oparem alkoholu a v pozadí se všemi melodiemi Gerryho Mulligana... no prostě a jednoduše tohle je paráda, sice ne pro každého, ale stále paráda.

This was my first real attempt at reading Jack Kerouac and I quickly realized that I had to forget that I was reading a novel (or, in this case, a novella) and think of it as a long, rambling, Beatnik poem. Then the run-on sentences, seemingly random plotting and the alcohol-fueled prose starts to make some sense. But I can't say that it was a totally satisfying experience.

My personal copy of this book has an interesting history. An original Avon paperback (price, 35 cents) I found it on my mother's bookshelves where it must have sat for 60 years. My father would've likely bought it around 1960, I'm guessing. He was no Party Animal, but he did have an avant-garde taste in literature. It's fun for me to imagine him sitting in his favourite chair, 31 years old, jet black hair, with a cigarette and a cup of coffee, enjoying hipster, wild man, Jack Kerouac. And now, here I am, 61 years old, sipping scotch and water, reading the exact same book.

I wonder if he really enjoyed it? Hard for me to say. He was really more of a John Le Carre man. Something else I picked up from him much later in life.

Anyway, this is of no interest to anyone but myself, but I thought I'd write about it. A literary connection spanning six decades. Thinking about you, Dad!

After looking at a GR reader's list of 'books read' today, I was wondering about Kerouac and thinking, I am quite sure I read more than "On The Road" back in the day, so I looked at the GR list of Kerouac books.

I read "On The Road" in about 1957 - I was 16. I had been 'into' early rock 'n roll since '55 and I was listening to folk music about the same time. Rock was very cool and although I loved Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Louis, Little Richard, et al., I was more inspired by folk music, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie etc., and what they, and their music, represented.

Coffee shops, or coffee houses, were the 'go' back then and the owners encouraged young 'folkies' to audition for the positions as resident singers. I couldn't get enough of our own folk-singers, all of whom sang what today are called "covers", no-one would have dreamed of writing and singing their own songs. So, for the cost of a couple of cups of coffee, plus maybe some toasted raisin bread, I could spend hours in a dimly lit coffee lounge, (candles, regular candles like those we saw at church, nothing fancy) and absorb the music and enjoy chatting with the customers, and the folkies. Several years later, at age 20, I was the Tuesday night 'resident folkie' at a coffee lounge not far from my home. I was learning classical guitar at the time, so it was good practice for my 'finger-style' playing, so beloved of folkies back then. This was before my all-time hero, Bob Dylan, changed to 'steel strings' and then, a bit later, he introduced his bloody electric guitar! We older folkies all screamed "Sacrilege!" but he is still the best of the best to me

In my spin through Kerouac's books, my friend said after reading On The Road and The Dharma Bums that my next task should be The Subterraneans.

Apparently, he wrote this 110-page book in only three days. While the bulk of On The Road was written in this way, making it an American classic, I have to say that for this book, it didn't work as well.

Here, Kerouac shows a more poetic than prosaic style. The sentences seem more like lyrics than in the other two books. Yet here that seemed to take away from the effect rather than enhance it.

It's a story about an affair with a biracial woman, Mardou, whose mother was black and whose abandoning father was Cherokee. Kerouac is at his best when he's detailing her torment and how her relationship with Leo soothes that pain.

His two other classics were, in its simplest form, buddy novels. While you could make a case that Mardou is his buddy here, the more direct connection is the fact that like Dean Moriarty in On the Road and like Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums, Mardou Fox leaves, and that leaves a hole in the protagonist never to be filled. Here, though, the reasons for it seem almost cliche. Guy gets too close to woman, tries to create some distance, ends up losing what he had and forgets how good he had it.

One thing I couldn't get passed is how Faulknerian the structure of this is -- which is a fancy way of saying that in 110 pages, there's only about nine paragraphs. Perhaps its my own style of writing and reading, but that grates on me.

If you love Kerouac's other books, I suggest a trip through The Subterraneans. But if you've never read a Kerouac novel, this is not the entryway.

Ahh, The beat generation. What an Isle of Misfit Toys. I think from most of the books I have read, the ones from the beat generation are the most interesting. I haven't secured a copy of On the Road But when I do I will fully judge Jack Kerouac. Moving on to this book. I was rather interested in the main character at the beginning of the book. He is a Vagabond/Sailor/Hippie in the San Francisco area. He has a group of friends that pretty much do nothing more then sit around and drink and smoke Tea aka Pot. It is a beautiful set up haha. Then he meets this beautiful girl Mardou and he falls in love, but at first she wants nothing to do with him. Mardou is black, but the funny thing is, is that this topic doesn't stir the racial pot at all really. This is pretty much the whole story, ecept throw in some random events and some sex.
I really struggled to read this. Not because it was difficult, but because of how bland it was. I had to read it though because I hadn't finished A Clockwork Orange and needed another book to report on. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't I have finished it.
This book left me with nothing, So I wouldn't recommend it.

«Y yo me devuelvo a casa, habiendo perdido su amor.
Y escribo este libro.»

3.5

While reading I confess in my unwriterliness and unjunkiness I did at first sneer (a fact) at the noisesome pages herein no period in sight and me knowing little of Beat, Frisco, small dark women clinging to fences with little voices and feet and worries (that is to say I saw only a tall broody Canuck—self described —spinning jealous phantasies and unable to find the essence he is searching-for-entitled-to-promised) went to my bed at 9 (a coward) and huddled there it shot through me like cats across an alley that I had been hasty and knew nothing of great writing or Subterraneans

So it’s kind of like that but ya know, better. It’s very much a vibe. I found there were some beautiful images and the rhythm of the aforementioned lack of periods grew on me, but mostly this reads like the word vomit of a drunk and high white man self-sabotaging. So if that’s your jam then this is it.