I have been wanting to read more from this era after finally reading On the Road, but it was much more difficult to read. After bailing on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I was determined to make it through this one, but now I pretty much wish I had done it the other way around.

It was just jarring to read. Like listening to Black Angels by George Crumb. You have to spin it, intellectualize it, to convince yourself that you appreciate it. Whatever addiction is, it isn't beautiful. It isn't life affirming, it doesn't even appreciate sex or connection. Once you accept that it won't be any of those things, you can move on to the really enjoyable chewy words. Like:

"When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity."

While I was slogging through Naked Lunch, a friend sent me off to listen to  Spare Ass Annie which is Burroughs reading some of his writing (including some excerpts from this novel) accompanied by a jazz-funk band, and it really helped. I started to hear it in his sarcastic, mocking, crotchety tone, and it just fit more. It didn't feel as desperate somehow.

And my favorite little bit:
"Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it."

270119: read ???... 90s?: this is a later addition: nearing an arbitrarily large number of books read (2 000 fiction, 1 000 nonfiction) i have been trying to decide what strategy of reading i will now adopt, after all by this time there should be some sense of what is for me at least enjoyable, fruitful, worthy of reading. i have decided that perhaps rereading those i rated five stars is the plan (and maybe four stars?). but then, as far as nonfiction, particularly philosophy, i do not know if truly i will get more out of it without prof help, and despite the interest, i do not actually want to be a philosopher. but fiction? maybe it is worthwhile, maybe i agree when umberto eco says, the definition of a favorite book is one you are ‘re’-reading, so it is worth reading these again, such as this book, sometimes liking it even more, as this book...

220615: this is a book i have read the necessary three times to truly judge- 1) pleasure heightened by novelty, 2) pleasure decreased by memory unobtaining novelty, 3) pleasure modulated by both novelty and jadedness correctly placed (note: i have rated many books read only once, many only twice, as you may search on my read-twice-or-more bookshelf). this is also a book that reflects how i have aged, how many books read, life lived, something like wisdom born of regret, from all those years...

i do actually like this book now even more, sensing how it has persisted in my memory, seeing how it has affected all the literary and other artwork experienced, how it has informed, insinuated itself, through my artistic life over not years but decades...

first reading, i was young, too young, to follow the particular text(s) burroughs calls 'naked lunch', generally felt myself not up to the task of reading it, bothered also by the gay porn, the vicious misogyny, the obsessive drug life- none of which reflected my life, concerns, thoughts, interests... yet, so many people i admired in person or in work, really thought it was a postmodern masterpiece... i just felt out of the loop... so, maybe, i admired it but did not love it any more than say pynchon's 'gravity's rainbow', which at least seemed to deal with an encompassing, involving, world-historical subject- ww2 and so on rather than pathetic addict life- even if that book was encyclopedic, no easier to read, and also of previous generation...

second reading, about when i saw cronenberg's film version, i knew more of and had read some of the 'beats' at university. who seemed then to be just baby boomer nostalgia, seemed less than earth-shattering, and so i felt too young to celebrate or nominate 'naked lunch', as great, as seismic, as anything more than than generation-specific work for which, man, you really had to be there, man, for it to work... gay porn no longer bothered me, gay sex no more felt a threat, misogyny just seemed of its time and an outrageous attitude of gayness, but in all, the 'transgressive' aspect of the story seemed overplayed... so they had all kinda sex, so they did all kinda drugs, so they had this all kinda paranoid conspiracy that everything was based on addiction/junk...

third reading, years later (decades...), reading alone, i deliberately decided to read more, to educate myself, about burroughs and this 'naked lunch' in particular, seeing as according to one list i am approaching an arbitrarily large number of fiction read, life lived, so maybe i could judge it better. and yes, whereas i had once believed any work of art should make its case for genius, for classic, for canon, for status... in itself, by itself, not according to social impact or historical effect or all the ancillary writings on it: i find it helpful to read on burroughs, to immerse myself in jargon, in details, of the 'interzone' world of drugs, simply because i am less distracted by it and can follow better where the work goes, and this time i am sure, i am convinced, i willingly argue, that 'naked lunch' is a masterpiece...

not that now i am simply so jaded that the relevant shock effects, the transgressive imagery, no longer 'works'- to the extent it matters, what humans do to humans and to themselves, no longer surprises me but does still sometimes horrify and summon anger. yet reading it now the text is so much more than 'story' i had searched for. how the story is told is what the story is told. the text is all kinda poetry. why do i only see this now, how much of this idea comes from certain works recently read that alert to me i like poetry. why does this work, for example, make me think of ben okri's work 'the famished road'? because that too is a long work of narrative poetry. 'naked lunch' more remarkably, i discover- now that drugs and sex and 'burnin' nigras' etc are so much ever present horrific background noise- is screamingly blackly comic! this is not news, after all i had read it twice. but was this time much more open to hilarity than horror, laughing through snippets of dialogue and outrageous described acts with no queasy premonition that i will feel really bad about myself tomorrow...

that there is no central character, that scenes move rapidly and suddenly as film images- this is supposedly unfilmable but powerfully imagistic- cronenberg's film was more of his own riff on 'naked lunch', that those that pretend to be human are mostly stereotypes, right thinking, obsessed with individuality becoming controlled, becoming one way divisionists versus liquefactionists, senders who want to control your mind, kill rebellion, control your desires, before you can even think about it... that there is black meat so delicious and addictive and nauseous you will eat then throw up then eat then throw up... until you are exhausted, that there are centipede monsters in human shells, some addict who just absorbs drugs by sortof oozing into contact with junkies... that there is no particular order, no logic, to how to the text is given, this no longer bothers me- it is words, not colours, not music, so the sentences must be read left to right, well i guess the 'routines' must be read in some order too... there are so many great routines: benway, the market, the talking asshole, the county clerk, the examination, hauser and o'brien... this makes me rethink my reading of samuel beckett- maybe i need to read him as poetry, too... and of course, any book that inspires one to read another book is a great book to me...

dream job: penguin clothbound selection committee. i wanna get inside the mind of the peoples who picked this one between brontës and dickenses

Oh boy. One part of me wants to throw this novel away because some parts are written like a 15-year-old's first foray into erotic fanfiction while another part of me wants to hail this as a masterpiece of filth that would make John Waters sick. So I'm going to settle in the middle. There are some parts of this novel that made me go "what the actual fuck" but I like that. I like it when literally every boundary is pushed as far as it can go. The prose is nonsensical and disorientating which is probably what Burroughs wanted. He was a Beat of course. I enjoyed this novel. The majority of it makes absolutely no sense and it isn't meant to.

Burroughs was a twisted ball of sorrow mixed with cynicism and lyrics. He killed his own wife by stupidity (While drinking in Mexico City, he waved a gun and told his wife, "Time for our William Tell act," even though they had never performed such an action previously. His wife, who was also drunk as well as undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, put a glass on her head. Burroughs shot and missed the glass, but hit his wife in the head, killing her instantly.) He lived with Jack Kerouac, and destroyed lives around him, but he also he poured his energy of doom onto the pages. When I read Naked Lunch as a 16 year old boy, the words ripped into me with the emotion that nothing else had. And like watching those driver-ed movies of the time (horrendous wrecks with graphic death), Burroughs words describing heroin and mind-destroying drug-trips were both enthralling and a warning: drive close to the edge and the rush might kill you. Shudder. But unforgettable. Read this one if you dare, but then be ready to be unable to forget it.

drivel

This novel is the literary equivalent to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings: Cut-up in a myriad of individual pieces that were then re-assembled in a more or less random manner, the story becomes liquid, and the panicked reader is adrift. You can certainly try to put everything Burroughs throws at you in a coherent order, but this author's aesthetic intentions will probably defeat you. Much like in the case of Pollock's drips of paint which create random patterns that seem to shift the longer you look at the painting, Burroughs has readers simultaneously perplexed and hypnotized. As the books defies conventional ways of narration, it is pretty hard to read, but if you're up for completely outrageous experimental stuff, Mr. Burroughs has got you covered...

...unless you're easily offended. This book really earned its obscenity trial, but know that the judges finally decided that selling the book should be legal - because of its social relevance. Burroughs brutally and often disgustingly writes about his life as a drug addict, his obsessions and compulsions, sexual exploits, and other hardcore shenanigans. Like his peers of the Beat Generation, he was living it up, pushing the boundaries of society and his own physical existence. The protagonist of "Naked Lunch", William Lee, is Burroughs' alter ego, and some other beatniks also feature. And while Kerouac's On the Road re-imagines his travels through the States, Burroughs not only haunts the continent, he also ventures into a spacey Interzone of intoxication and excess.

One could certainly fill several books with all the (to put it mildly) questionable things this author did and said, but his writing is wild and fascinating - certainly not cheerful or particularly accessible, but thoroughly shocking. If you want to learn more about Beat literature (plus a little Gonzo), you can listen to our podcast special here (in German).

This book is crap. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg should have left it on the crusty, filth-laden floor of Burrough's apartment where they found it. If you want to read a book written by a guy on enough drugs to kill a stallion, please, by all means, subject your brain to hell. Otherwise, read "Junky," at least it has a plot. Sort of.

As far as I am concerned, “Naked Lunch” is an epitome of a work of high significance for the genre, for its programme and concept, yet with few universal or individual qualities.

This series of drug-induces hallucinations, loosely connected into a novel through reoccurring characters, probably does mark the height of cut-up technique in American literature. It is also surely one of the representative examples of the Beat Generation and their creative principles in full bloom. I tend to define the interest in American canon of the twentieth century a something on the theoretical side.

As for practical terms, “Naked Lunch” would be an account of drug abuse like countless others, with focus on the drug experience itself as gloriously surreal. This funfair inside one’s head lacks any sort of development from addiction to withdrawal, but instead presents a (rich, to say the least) sequence of paranoid episodes and sadistic burst of various body fluids into even more various body orifices.

I can quite understand that in the sixties this approach to literature was shocking and outrageous from the perspective of traditional culture, and that, given the social and political circumstances, a copy of “Naked Lunch” in your pocket became a symbol of the youth rebellion against convention, society, norm. But all drafted attempts on social issues and some intense and highly suggestive text excerpts are buried under superhuman loads of sticky jism. So for the first fifteen pages I was patiently waiting to see the function of those oh-so-obscene episodes incorporated into a whole. There is none. With both eyes on the real world, the overkill on shock-value is nothing but laughable. No one is ever going to be appalled, disgusted or horrified by sadistic penetration. The idea of showing audiences how mediocre they are it is simply bleak and blunt. And with the repetitive use of the same phrases and metaphors it is also an overkill of the mentioned overkill.

With all the ideas and goals that “Naked Lunch” is based on, striped of its significance as a model for a phase in the history of literature, it comes down to a self-indulgent and self-congratulatory hallucinatory rant.

I'd love to rate this one higher, but however groundbreaking it was at the time, I always felt that Burroughs went on to produce much better books. Just like Kerouac had stronger stuff than On the Road, so too did WSB in comparison to this.

It still has one of the most apt titles ever. Contrary to what the small-minded prudes who brought the obscenity case against it assumed, this book has nothing to do with some lewd midday meal. "Naked Truth" might've been a better title, if it weren't such a meaningless cliché. Instead, the reader is forced to eat the truth, finally seeing "what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon." For an audience so accustomed to spoon-fed bullshit, Naked Lunch was and still is a refreshing menu option.

But don't stop there, kiddies, don't stop there....

Me he llevado una gran decepción al leer esto; aunque también siento intriga por el resto de libros de Burroughs. En buena parte, siento que hay algo que siempre me aparta de los escritores Beat: puede que sea su ánimo contestatario (que no es reaccionario, pues se trata de reivindicar algo más de los mismos valores liberales norteamericanos con cierta dosis de rebeldía ya no tan puritana), su provincialismo (siempre sintiéndose en el ombligo del planeta, como los más "civilizados", cultos, etc. Casi como predicadores cristianos, sólo que sin un ideal mesiánico pero con un plan de emancipación terreno), su extrema gritería (la imagen sexual-escatológica-pagana como hechizo al lector), ese afán por salirse del molde y demás cosas que me fascinaban a los 17 pero que hoy veo con algo de sospecha.

En el caso de Burroughs, creo que este es, tal vez, el texto más arriesgado de los que he leído de los beats. De un modo algo tosco en su forma narrativa, sin desconocer cierta pizca de ingenio que suele incinerarse demasiado pronto, el escritor pretende adentrarse en la psiquis del adicto: en sus miedos, temores, sinsentidos y experiencias más cercanas. Para alguien que no hubiese consumido varias de las drogas mencionadas (como era el caso de la sociedad norteamericana de dicha época, adicta al licor y al cigarrillo pero desconocedora de otras sustancias en su mayoría), este libro podía ser un hallazgo, un brote de sinceridad que estimula la curiosidad ante otra manera de vivir ("el tiempo del adicto", diría Burroughs. Tiempo que, antes que ser heroico, es triste, solapado y miserable. En esto, Burroughs es franco en su exposición: esto no es un manifiesto pro-consumo; por el contrario, es un retrato de ciertas experiencias del adicto que, lejos de ser gratas, tienden a ser míseras) o; por el contrario, podía ser un manifiesto de la corrupción de los valores tradicionales . Sin embargo, hoy en día el libro es demasiado pretencioso e insulso: sin ser un gran consumidor de sustancias psicoactivas (he probado varias, algunas duras, pero prefiero no comprar por razones morales; en especial, que no deseo apoyar ninguna forma de guerra ni conflicto armado), he sentido que mucho de lo que se dice es exagerado...morbósamente estimulante para el lector.

Tal vez en este punto no soy muy caritativo (Burroughs escribe sobre la adicción, y ciertamente yo nunca he vivido algo similar), pero la experiencia normal del consumo de estas sustancias no excede una breve alucinación (exceptuando algunos ácidos) o ataque de paranoia. Burroughs juega con la idea contraria: el adicto es alguien que vive en otro tiempo, en función del sinsentido (sus imágenes, escatológicas y violentas, tienden a reforzar esta idea) y de una necesidad básica fundamental: el satisfacer su adicción y evitar el "bajonazo" o "recaída". Dicha noción invade la forma de la novela, que es escrita sin una continuidad, trama o pivote que sirva de eje de sentido (a pesar del constante relato sobre drogas y la aparición esporádica de varios personajes; sobre todo del doctor Benway). Aunque el ejercicio puede llegar a ser muy interesante (hay un par de apartados brutales, geniales, alguien podría decir), siento que aquí faltó mucho para escribir algo del todo consistente: el relato es inconexo, plagado de imágenes (unas forzadas, otras verdaderamente increíbles) y desperdigado a más no poder (casi como pequeñas alucinaciones que, dicho sea, no siempre son interesantes. En cierto modo, muchas son repetitivas). Si bien Burroughs quería mostrar algo del sinsentido que vive del adicto desde la forma y las historias contadas, como experiencia literaria el libro es pobre en su mayoría (creo que, en esto, hasta el mismo escritor concordaría en que el interés es más experimental que de disfrute literario). Incluso, puede que varios de los pasajes narrados por Irvine Welsh logren el objetivo del escritor norteamericano fructíferamente.

Al respecto, existen un par de pasajes que pueden servir de guía para el lector que desee embarcarse en esta obra. Todos hacen parte del "Prefacio atrofiado" que, dicho sea, me pareció de lo más interesante del libro:

"Sólo hay una cosa de la que puede escribir un escritor: lo que está ante sus sentidos en el momento de escribir ... Soy un aparato para grabar...No pretendo imponer "relato", "argumento", "continuidad"... En la medida en que consigo un registro Directo de ciertas áreas del proceso psíquico, quizá desempeñe una función concreta...No pretendo entretener..." (Pág. 357 de la versión Compendium de Burroughs publicada por Anagrama).

"La Palabra está dividida en unidades que juntas formarán una pieza y así deben ser tomadas, pero las piezas pueden ser consideradas en cualquier orden ya que están unidas en sentidos contrarios, dentro y fuera, arriba y abajo, como en una combinación amorosa interesante. Este libro expulsa las páginas en todas direcciones, calidoscopio de panoramas, popurrí de melodías y ruidos callejeros, pedos y protestas y las cortinas metálicas del comercio que se bajan, aullidos de dolor y angustia y aullidos de simple lamentación, gatos copulando y rechinantes berridos de la cabeza de toro cortada, murmullos de brujo en trance de nuez moscada, cuellos rotos y mandrágoras que aúllan, sollozos del orgasmo, heroína silenciosa como el amanecer en células sedientas." (Pág. 364).

Más allá de las consideraciones que aquí he expuesto, creo que esta novela termina siendo una especie de relato en el que se combinan aspectos distópicos (casi como Un mundo Feliz pero sin atmósfera narrada, a la manera de temores inconexos operando desde instituciones público-estatales); temores de la época (el temor a la guerra con los soviéticos, la amenaza de la bomba, etc); distintas drogas en cantidades industriales; un buen narrador de imágenes que no es del todo juicioso en su labor de escritor; un ánimo contestatario pero nunca revolucionario; un afán por el exceso que ya había sido tratado con mayor precisión por otros escritores (Rabelais, Joyce, por nombrar algunos). Pensé en darle una calificación de sólo una estrella, pero al final decidí que, al menos por el intento experimental y un par de pasajes interesantes (cortos y nada fundamentales, a decir verdad), el libro merece las dos estrellas.

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

Hmmmmmm, what can I say about Naked Lunch????? I think I’ll let the immortal words of Gwen Stefani speak for me . . .

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I’ll gladly admit I’m probably too stupid to see the genius that Burroughs created with this book, but I just don’t see it. A series of incoherent ramblings from a drug-addled mind published in order to blur the boundary between art and obscenity that just don’t stand the test of time. 50+ years ago, this work was shocking, but now????? Notsamuch. Writing that was supposed to make me go mad or at the very least make me

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only caused me to wonder why I continued wasting my time on this book instead of moving on to one of the other 17,000,000 on my to-read list.

In my opinion, if you want to read something from a – how should I put it – um, “medicinally inspired” author, then pick up some Hunter S. Thompson and close the door on Burroughs.

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