Kerouac's kind of a dick in this one, whining and chasing after this black girl Mardou all through the book. Once she caves in to his non-existent charms he dumps her like he's Tommy Lee or something.
When he's not crying for her to take him back he's busy fetishizing her blackness like she's a pickaninny doll and then drunkenly makes in-crowd jokes to his pals about Buddha and Boddhisatva. What a shithead.

Well, after having reread On the Road for a lecture I was supposed to give but didn't, I couldn't help but return to this, one of my favorites, to again walk the tragic lovelorn streets of North beach with Leo Percepied and co.

The Subterraneans is remarkable for its form--practically one long sentence with innumerable but smooth as silk and poetic as fuck digressions--which impressed me the first time I read it and continues to impress me now, nearly 40 years on. It's far greater in just about every way, to me, than the more famous On the Road even because of its brevity. It might have been too dense, too exhausting to keep up such a dense, spontaneous prose style and utter honesty for two or three hundred pages, exhausting for both author and reader, it might not have been as good as this pure blast of emotion, self-recrimination, and meditation on the author's intense desire for love but obvious inability to live it.

It's melancholy tragic, and yearns in its every line for an understanding of self that always eludes its narrator, or seems to, given that no amount of self-recrimination in retrospect ever seems to alter his love/self-destructive behavior. He even pooh-poohs his lover's therapy, which he distracts her from, as a dead-end because problem-solving based even as he here writes his own problem over for us to see, never stopping himself to consider that he could change or fix his behavior in any way. He's aware yet always unaware, or somehow ancient Greek in outlook, Oedipus who has left the crossroads behind and who seems never to have had the luxury of choice for the writing appears to come before the living practically, the doom dreamed into being rather than ruminated on afterward. He plunges forward through desire, love, and then love's sabotaging in a reckless state of abandon, as if that were the real goal, to see but never perceive.

Precious to me that William Gaddis, then, makes a cameo here, given The Recognitions's thematizing this very concept. How perfect.


PS I put this on a list I made back on another review as one of the greatest San Francisco novels of all time. it is, interesting, and feels VERY San Francisco and North Beech (where I was the night manager of Columbus Books, a second-hand shop near City Lights on Columbus Ave., for some years back in the 1980s). Odd and kinda sad to admit it was Kerouac's publisher, apparently, who demanded he move the scene from NYC in order to somehow avoid lawsuits since his fiction was too close to reality to please the lawyers. I'm literally amazed as this information as the city at times, its fog, its feelings, street names, neighborhood moods, really works here at a level seemingly far more important than a mere casually setting chosen to content the penny-counters and legal eagles. Thus the power of fiction conquers all again. it's a super San Francisco story that actually happened in NYC. But many of these people actually did their time in the Bay Area as well, and, well, Bohemia is ubiquitous. Having myself been a San Francisco Bohemian for a decade, this can only ring true as a Fender Strat, even at three decades distance. The streets and the Boho way of life abide.

A self-lacerating account of an interracial love affair from which Kerouac emerges in a bad light and which inspires you to really reach out and connect to your Other Half. Kerouac is all about Aloneness.

4.5/5. the same raw poetry of kerouac’s experience of life, here distilled into the exploration of an ultimately doomed love affair set against the backdrop of beat san francisco. all the electricity i love and envy in his work in a shorter format; his brash eloquence is phenomenal.
‘suddenly the streets were so bleak, the people passing so beastly, the lights so unnecessary just to illumine this… this cutting world’.

For me this was a special experience, not necessarily because of the story but because of Kerouacs writing style, the language he uses leaves you behing speachless and it´s probably some of the best prose I´ve ever read.

A good read, though obviously a product of its time. Kerouac's feverish yearning to live in the moment is engaging, though directly leads to issues, such as his mistreatment of his companions and alcohol abuse. His writing and the story are exciting and true to the pace of his life but are often muddled by tangents and confusing run on passages that diverge from the true purpose of this story. The Subteranneans was written in three days, which is a feat in itself, but also prevents the book from being more well thought out and engaging. Kerouac sits in the odd place of being very progressive and ahead for his time, but viewed through a modern lense, is a man with deep flaws and problematic views. Throughout the novella (and his other works) anyone other than his close male friends are treated as an object. His love interest in this book, Mardou, is often described as the exotic prize he has won. At times he does acknowledge her intellect and her individuality, but more often than not describes her in a way that objectifies and reduces her to his antiquated views on femininity and race. He also repeatedly puts down lgbtq individuals, despite his closest friend Allen Ginsberg being gay. Kerouac does seem to acknowledge his own flaws in some right, but seems to never have acknowledged them enough to make a deeper change. I'd recommend this book to fans of Kerouac, but suggest others who have not read his other books start elsewhere.

"I am crudely malely sexual and cannot help myself and have lecherous and so on propensities as almost all my male readers no doubt are the same."

One of the most compelling aspects of Kerouac's writing is how unsparing he can be about his major faults as a person. He proves this over and over, especially in this novella.

THE SUBTERRANEANS concerns an oft-feckless white bohemian (Leo) who has a brief but intense relationship with a troubled woman of black and Cherokee ancestry. The woman is beautiful and book and street smart but emotionally fragile. The man is a well-read dropout philosopher who drinks hard and has a gift for self-sabotage. Their affair is played out against early 1950s San Francisco bohemia. "Frisco" (may Herb Caen forgive me) was a West Coast center for the post-war rejection of conventional values, a capital for "Beat" Culture for which Jack Kerouac became a reluctant paragon.
Like all his other major works read today, it is apparently autobiographical and infused with a lyrical and gritty stream-of-consciousness style that showed how studious and observant he must have been, even when smashed on red wine and possibly pills. Like all great writers--and no doubt Jack Kerouac was one--he makes you see and feel the atmosphere of the people and places he takes us to. Long riffs are broken into brief spates of dialogue. This sort of prose may take some time to get into, but the reader has the reward of following along with a very reliable (if not always likable) narrator.

edit.

jack kerouac i’ll see you in hell

Maanalaiset (1958) on valittaja-Kerouacin mustasukkaista jaarittelua.

Siinä missä Matkalla ja Dharmapummit ovat 1950-luvun nuori Amerikka musteeksi läiskittynä, on tämä kirja autofiktiota siitä miten Kerouac haluaa olla naisen kanssa, mutta sitten kun on naisen kanssa, se on liian vaikeaa ja kun vääjämätön ero lopulta tulee se on naisen vika. Välinäytöksinä on yleistä remuamista ja dokaamista.

Kai tätä valittavaa sävyä voisi hyvällä tahdolla kuvailla "taiteilijamaiseksi herkkyydeksi", mutta kyllä se on ihan vaan fragiilia maskuliinisuutta. Kerouacin "spontaani proosa" ei myöskään loista, koska kuvailtavat tapahtumat eivät yksinkertaisesti taivu sillä ilmaistavaksi. Nykylukijan näkökulmasta Kerouacin afro-amerikkalaisten eksotisointi ja rakkausintressi Mardoun "tummuuden" alituinen korostus on myös aika raskasta, mutta ehkä sen nyt olisi voinut vielä antaa anteeksi jos kirja olisi muuten hyvä.

Mutta se ei ole. Tämä Kerouac kannattaa passata jos ei nyt satu olemaan superfani.

I had not read any Kerouac for 30 years and saw this one in the library -written in his 'spontaneous prose' style which requires a lot of concentration to read and absorb. Set in San Francisco, with friends like Ginsberg and Burroughs disguised with pseudonyms, it tells of a love affair with a half-negro, half-Cherokee woman. The narrative is dominated by his drinking and his frustration at not being published is also obvious, and his alter-ego, Leo, is not a sympathetic character. Reputedly written in 3 days, there are some great phrases hidden in the narrative style - I particularly liked 'othergenerationey' as an adjective.

“Ve bu kitabı yazıyorum.” diye biten, yollarda aşk molaları veren bir kitap Yer altı Sakinleri. An itibari ile gündemde olan 138 yasak kelimeden biri olan “Beat” kuşağının öncülerinden Jack Kerouac’ın samimi kitabı. Jack Keouac yine yollardadır, her zamanki gibi ama bu sefer aşk için yolculuklarına mola verir, yeraltı sakinleriyle sohbet eder, onlarla takılır, aşk yaşar. Elinde yine içkisi vardır, sigarası vazgeçilmezidir zaten ve uyuşturuculardan da tatmadan edemez. Kafası bir milyondur, âşıktır âşık olmasına ama alkol, ot derken özgüvensizliği bedenine sahip olur, çenesi düşer, boş laflar eder ve hiç de planda olmayan aşk yolculuğu hiç planda olmayan molalarını kendisi verir. Ve dediğine göre oturur üç gün üç gece bu kitabı yazar. Sevindirir, hüzünlendirir, dersler verir.

Ayrıntı Yayınları’nın Yeraltı Edebiyatı Dizisi’nden çıkan kitap 160 sayfalık bir hayat hikâyesi.

Zeynep Demirsü’nün çevirdiği kitap, bu edebiyat tarzını sevdirir cinsten ve dokunaklı. Yazar kitabı 1958 yılında yazmış 1960 yılında da Ranald Macdougall tarafından sinemaya uyarlanmış. Türkçe’ye ise 2010 yılının eylül ayında kazandırıldı.

Jack Kerouac kitabın bir bölümünde şöyle der:
“güneşi, gemileri görebiliyorduk, dışarıda aylak aylak dolanmakta olan insanoğlunu, bunun cidden ne muhteşem bir şey olduğunu ve nasıl olup da asla değerini bilmediğimizi, kaygılarımızın ve derilerimizin içinde kasvette başka bir şeyin olmadığını, gerçekten tıpkı ahmaklar gibi olduğumuzu ya da körleşmiş, şımarık, tiksindirici veletler gibi, hani surat asarlar ya; çünkü… istedikleri… bütün… şekerleri… alamamışlardır.”

Spontane şekilde üç günde yazılmış ama uzun bir süre anlatan ve Jack Kerouac’ı olduğu kadar Beat kuşağını ve diğer sakinlerini anlatan kitap, okunmaya değer.