Fun fact: Kerouac wrote the book over three days and nights on a speed binge. Neutral fact: you can read it in under three hours. Not so fun fact: it reads like a book written by someone in three days on a speed binge. Count yourself lucky that I never tried to publish the evidence.

Anyway, I don't much care for the Beats.

I reread this whenever I feel a relationship going sour....

Or at least I used to, when I was younger, which is when most of Kerouac's insights and emotions are most prescient.

"Cuando surgió en mí la comprensión de la necesidad de regenerar el amor universal, como corresponde a un gran escritor, como un Lutero o un Wagner, y ahora esta cálida imagen de grandeza es un vasto escalofrío en el viento, porque la grandeza también muere, ay, y, ¿quién dijo que yo era grande? ¿Y suponiendo que uno fuera un gran escritor, un secreto Shakespeare, de la noche acolchada? Realmente un poema de Baudelaire no compensa su dolor.
Y yo me vuelvo a casa, habiendo perdido su amor.
Y escribo este libro"

Los subterráneos es una novela de amor, pero no es nunca lo que se espera, Kerouac siempre puede sorprender, se espera que lo haga de una y mil formas. Una historia de amor con un eterno ir y venir de sensaciones, drogas, alcohol, jazz, literatura, la cálida San Francisco y un alter ego de Kerouac un tanto chocante enamorado de aquel triste ángel negro de la noche que hace que Leo Percepied, nuestro protagonista, tenga sueños agónicos, sueños delirantes, caóticos, poéticos y, sobre todo, estremecedores. Ilusiones descabelladas, tristes, humanas, sombrías en el mundo subterráneo de la generación beat.

This is the third book by Kerouac I have read, and without fail, they all have an unusual raw emotional gravity about them. This book is short burst of linguistic invention--supposedly written in only three days, and it reads as such. It weighs in at a little over 100 pages, but is full of love, disgust, drunkenness, excitment, and the peculiar next-day regret hangover. It does not match either On the Road or The Town and the City in terms of overall narrative power, but is a strangely compelling book after you adjust to Kerouac's fevered prose style. The Subterraneans is sometimes difficult to read--Kerouac can go for pages without paragraph or punctuation--but does become more manageable as the book nears conclusion.

There is some weakness in the portrayal of the supporting characters, and the novel is much more interested in painting vivid word-pictures that give the reader a sort of strobe-light impression of events than it is in any kind of serious character study. But if you are a Keraouc fan, you know what you are getting into here. And while I did find myself on the fence about whether I actually enjoyed the book as I worked through it, the ending was strong enough to pull over into the plus column. As a final note, it is humorous to take a look at the Kerouac reviews on Amazon and notice how the reviewers tend to take on Kerouac's writing style to a degree as they review his books--an amusing feature which I am afraid that I have succumbed to as well.

es el primer libro de jack kerouac donde está enamorado de una mujer por completo y tienen una relación tan linda y al mismo tiempo tan horrible y cansadora. fue tan personal para mi leerlo y logra transmitir el exacto sentimiento de una relación de ese tipo, la descripción de la ansiedad y del dolor

I am an admitted Kerouac fan and I think most people who read Kerouac begin and end with On the Road, which was of course groundbreaking in its day. I loved On the Road and have read it repeatedly on and off over decades. Subterraneans, however, sat on my shelf in the I'll-get-to-it pile. This book (more a novella than an novel)chronicles his affair with Mardou Fox (Alene Lee was her real name), a young black woman. While some have called it racist, and others misogynistic (the Beats weren't the most enlightened guys when it came to women), I think it has to be taken as a product of its time. Consider that an interracial relationship would have been pretty radical in the 50's, and both Kerouac's alter ego, Leo and Mardou both realize this.

What struck me was the utter nakedness of Kerouac in this completely stream of consciousness book. He shows himself to be sexually confused and conscious of that. He knows he's broken in many ways, discussing his mental state and his very strong and probably damaging relationship with his mother. He talks about wanting to live the life of freedom and kicks while simultaneously wanting to settle down, and he knows that he won't be successful at either. This is a completely introspective book and he spared himself nothing.

While some will find the wild prose off putting, I loved it. Reading this book is more like being carried away in a river current than actually reading. In the end, it broke my heart and made me sad for Kerouac and his confusion, his belief in his own failure on every level, and his seeming acceptance of that.

The Subterraneans is a good example of Kerouac's attempt at trying to establish a Beat prose-style. After having read or attempted to read (seeing as I still have to finish reading the novel) On the Road, I was surprised by the ending of the Subterraneans as well as its more apparent plot. The subject matter was different from what I expected to find in a work by Kerouac. It took me a while to get used to the style again and at times I found it difficult to continue reading. Still, especially after having read Holmes's novel Go, I really liked the passage with Kerouac's take on his and Holmes's friendship as well as the unexpected ending.

Kerouac surely is a strong contender for the title of boringest writer of America, if not the world. It's a continuing mystery to me why he and his books continue to be be printed and, so it seems, read, and even appear to hold attraction for some. He doesn't have an original idea in his head or a single worthwhile sentence in his typewriter or his wallpaper, it seems to me. In fact, the entire beat writer's scene has always seemed extremely boring to me. But of all the stories from and about that scene, Kerouac's prose is probably just about the worst. What drivel.

And that's not because I can't stand long sentences or rambling stories or alcohol soaked literature per se. Writers as divers as Thomas Bernhard or Bohumil Hrabal excel some or all of those qualities. But this book (or that other totem of the Beat generation, On the Road)... I just don't get what people get from it. Rhyme nor reason.

I really loved this book. Jack Kerouac, for all his iconic writing and cliche beatnick status, still manages to capture the life and thoughts of the younger generation who were simply looking for any sort of adventure. That is, they have their own dreams and attempt to reach them. Kerouac shows their growth and takes his readers through the realization that things aren't like they expected them to be. Somehow, though, even though this sort of melancholic epiphany seems to be common for his endings (at least in the books of his I have read), he manages to leave me with a sense of understanding, to leave me with the feeling that everything is alright. He approaches lost-love like an experience.
Overall, I really liked this book. The lack of true sentence structure made it difficult to read in small bursts, so I suggest devoting large portions of time to it if you are going to read it. It took me almost three weeks of reading in-between classes to finish it.
I highly suggest this book.

La vida de Jack Kerouac, y por extensión la del resto de los beatniks, fue tan interesante y divertida que no necesitan crear personajes para escribir libros; ellos mismos se bastan y se sobran para crear historias.

Este es uno de esos libros perfectos para leer fumando en el suelo del baño a las 2 de la madrugada (lo cual he hecho en más de una ocasión, a decir verdad). No es mi primera vez con Kerouac; ya había leído su obra más famosa (la obra más famosa de la generación beat, de hecho), En El Camino, la cual me fascinó enteramente y me pareció el manifiesto perfecto de una generación, maravillosamente escrita, una novela muy inspirada. La verdad es que poco hay de esa inspiración en Los Subterráneos, una novela mucho más sencilla y con pretensiones mucho menores que las que parece haber en En El Camino. Con todo, es una obra entretenida, corta, muy divertida y que gracias al uso del monólogo interior o corriente de conciencia la dota de amenidad, improvisación y espontaneidad. Las descripciones, situaciones y reflexiones se suceden una detrás de otra sin apenas descanso, y los saltos en el tiempo son constantes y en ocasiones confusos.

Los Subterráneos es una orgía de sexo, drogas, alcohol y jazz, una de esas fiestas únicas en la vida que quizás algunos de nosotros soñemos con vivir algún día, una oda al hedonismo más absoluto y a un estilo de vida alocado y frenético, cuyas reflexiones no dejan un poso tan profundo en mí como lo hizo su obra cumbre, pero que sin embargo posee pasajes y momentos de verdadera belleza literaria. Debería haber un poco de los beatniks en cada uno de nosotros.

"Los subterráneos" es una música para ser oída de noche, con sus largos fraseos que suben y bajan, bocanadas de aire etílico y versos que estallan contra la ciudad: San Francisco, ciudad de maricas, poetas y vagabundos.
Tened cuidado de no perderos en esta ciudad subterránea, de andar por la calle equivocada, en la que todo envejece mal: el canto por el amor perdido, la energía sexual que fluye por las páginas, o ese amor pagano. Tal vez no sea más que el culto a sí mismo del dios Kerouac.
Entonces el ritmo se detiene, se corta la respiración, la ciudad pierde su magia, y la música se hace cháchara, ruido, vana música de fondo para curarse del tedio. Bajo el sopor de la música nocturna, te extravías en cualquier portal, fuera del abrigo de las largas noches de alcohol y sexo.

A profoundly sad novel. I fall in and out of love with Kerouac's prose, but his story rips your heart out. It was recommended to me by a colleague who told me that this book is about "people who make decisions by not making any choices."