n  "I'd been staying at the holiday Inn with my girl-
friend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd
ever known, for three days under a phoney name,
shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate
steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john,
puked, cried, accused one another, begged one
another, forgave, promised, and carried one an-
other to heaven."n


These highly additive tales are as masterly controlled as their muzzy-headed characters are chaotic.
Johnson's world in governed by addiction, malevolence, faith and uncertainty. It is a place where attempts at salvation remain radically provisional, and where a teetering narrative architecture uncannily expresses both Christlike and pathological traits of thought. The sincere narrative voices come just as much from the guts as they do the mind, and like an assemblance of lostprophets, there is an undercurrent of religiousness about them. If the first story about a hitchhiking addict and a car crash during a biblical downfall was anything to go by, then I knew I'd likely end up with these burned into my memory - and I was right. One big theme running through a lot of Johnson's work is the consciousness of mortality, and he compounds this here more than others.

Unsettling and heartbreakingly beautiful, simply told yet deep enough to plummet into one's soul, my second reading of this was just as good as the first if not better.

“And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
.
Imagine, you’re driving at sunset on the highway, the speedometer hits 80,90,100. You have a cigarette in your left hand, the tip burns bright as you ash it out the window. You’re surrounded by five friends, two cramped into the front seat the other three in the back. The radio is playing a song you all know the words to, you’re eighteen, you’re invincible. There’s no restriction to what the night brings, you’re alive, loved, broken, full of euphoric nostalgia.
.
That is how I felt while reading Jesus�� son by Denis Johnson, it was finding the perfect short story collection over 25 years since it had been published, it ironically made me feel alive. The interconnected stories are all told by the same narrator weaving his life over a period of youthful years living as a heroin addict, an alcoholic, a lover, and a friend. This book reached parts of me I didn’t know I still felt. It’s short but so long in the lasting impression it will leave on me. Johnson has won the National Book Award and been a finalist for the Pulitzer, and somehow it wasn’t for this collection. There was such much humanity in these pages, it dripped with feverish longing, for what I feel can be interpreted in many different ways. So many have told me how great this book was and I’m glad I finally found the right time to read it. It’s perfect, a modern classic, a book I will probably re-read before the end of the year again. The haunting final line keeps you wanting more “all these weirdos, and me getting a little better everyday right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us”
.

هنوز به یک بخش از وجودش اجازه نداده بود متولد شود، چون برای یک چنین جایی زیادی زیبا بود.

نمره‌ای که این کتاب از ایرانیها گرفته به مراتب پایینتر از نمره‌ایه که دیگران بهش دادن. این به نظرم چند علت داره.
1. در درجه اول ترجمه‌ی بی‌وسواسِ پیمان خاکسر، که البته نسبت به کارهای دیگه‌ای که ازش خونده‌م بهتر بود .
2. نشناختن این شیوه از روایت توسط مخاطب ایرانی.
3. جدا بودن جو فکری ایرانی‌ها (در دوره‌ی تالیف کتاب) از فضای فکری دنیا، به علت جنگ و قبلترش انقلاب. این باعث می‌شه ما به ازا و مصداق واضحی از روایت توی ذهن مخاطب نباشه.
4. شگرد-دوست بودن مخاطب‌های غیرایرانی.
5. تلخی واضح و آزارنده‌ی تصاویر و مفاهیم، که چون کلیت متن توسط مخاطب متوسط به راحتی درک نمی‌شه، ممکنه توی ذوق بزنه.

داستان‌های آخر فوق‌العاده بودن.

2011 Review:
Reading this was like a mind-explosion. I literally felt my brain sizzling trying to make sense of each wonderful yet muddled vignette that this collection presented. However, each of the harrowing stories in this book work fine, like clockwork in exploring the minds of drug-addicted souls. And haunting too.

2021 Review:

I inhaled rereading this exquisite little collection of vignettes. Jesus' Son became one of my "read again's" after ten years of having discovered the genius that was the late great, Denis Johnson; and this time, I felt so dizzy having experienced what Fuck Head has gone through simply because I felt I was alive with him, in every situation, every adventure, and every relationship gone wrong.

Sad sack characters can be tedious, and over indulgent, but FH is one of the most humane I've read in literature. Aside from possible undiagnosed schizophrenia, obvious heroin addiction, and disturbing and abusive behavior towards women, especially the "love" of his life, Michelle; all these combinations could have given FH a redemptive arc.

However, Johnson, like drug addiction, doesn't let us come off the hook that easy, "we had that helpless, destined feeling" (Johnson 39).

"Two Men" is a harrowing story of a home invasion gone wrong, FH is unaware it might have been Michelle's place he violates. "Out on Bail" is about the beautiful man, Jack Hotel whom FH gets into a stupor with; "Work" is about another misadventure, this time a robbery that goes wrong and Michelle can't cope with FH's erratic behavior, "with each step, my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me" (Johnson 37). But we see how much these two lovers are codependent, and it’s what makes the stories all the more heartbreaking.

We also meet other addicts, Dundun, and McInnes who gives FH his name, "then you were dead, what would you care? How would you know the difference?" (Johnson 98).

The collection makes for a trippy odyssey in the American landscape- from Arizona, Idaho, to British Columbia, and Missouri, where sparse and lonely images permeate through Johnson's text with such a realistic, uneasy feeling of being an outsider, of lost souls wandering around waiting for their next fix.

There's even a suggestion that FH could have been or was a writer, as mentioned as he works as a newsletter writer for the Beverly Home.

Beverly Home, one of the final vignettes finds FH in a relationship with two different women, one who turns out to be a married Mennonite, and the other a dwarf with whom he takes out kinky fetishes with.

Though he finds sexual gratification in fucking these women, the book remains an episodic saga of a fragmented mind looking for love, what he is missing, continuously returning to stupors again and again to find what he's lost.

FH is a soulful character looking for his lost soul, and it is his idea of love that keeps him going.

This book ruined my reading bone for a long time. I wanted every story I read, every story by every other author, to be just like the stories in Jesus' Son. But of course they weren't and aren't and they stand alone in my mind, even now. Perhaps it's the whiskey talking, but I'd go so far as to call this little book one of the greatest of my generation. Not that such superlatives carry any weight anymore. I just can't get over this book. It was my first true love.

دنیس جانسون در این کتاب، دنیا رو از زوایایی دیده بود که برام تازگی داشتن. با اینکه همیشه با کمّی کردن کیفیات مخالفت اکید دارم، به این کتاب پنج ستاره میدم. دوست دارم چندبار دیگه هم بخونمش. تلخ بود اما گیرا بود.
نویسنده های زیادی دوست دارن چنین کتاب موجز اما تأثیرگذاری بنویسن اما اکثرشون مجموعه‌ی هنرمندای ناکامی ان که زندگیشون یه خطّ صافه، درست مثل خط دستگاه ضربان قلبِ بعد از مرگِ آدمیزاد. کسایی با افکار بسیار محدود و صد البته افرادی ترسو، کسایی که جرأت ندارن حتا با یه خانم دست بدن یا از ��رس به‌خطر افتادن سلامتی یا حرفِ مردم سیگار هم نمی‌کشن. کسایی که اگه بخوای زندگیشون رو رُمان کنی، توی همون چند خط اول، خوابت می‌بره. آخه کسی که شب از بی پولی توی خیابون نخوابیده باشه چطور می تونه از دربه‌دری داستان بنویسه؟

اما دنیس جانسون با همه‌‌شون فرق داره.
اون تا آخر خط رفته و برگشته و نشسته و پسر عیسا رو نوشته.

a collection that could only have been written by a man (derogatory). "car crash while hitchhiking" was the singular standout here. also the way denis johnson writes about black people is weird.

i think if you compare this collection to, for example, lucia berlin's stories about addicts, you'll see that it can be done in a way that's raw, vulgar, and agonizingly wrought, without nearly every female character feeling like a vehicle for the male narrator's depravity. like, okay, i get that the american/iowa writer's workshop litfic circuit loves this because it's kooky and irreverent in both style and form—the prose here has moments of absurd elegance—but it's annoying that i have to wade through so much hypersexual bullshit to enjoy writing by white men omfg. i'm sick of it.

i would so much rather read about antisocial, off-beat perverts from mary gaitskill (smarter, more incisive) than the thoughtless "ooh, i want to rape this woman!" interjections from johnson, just to get a paragraph or two so beautiful i have to catch my breath. not worth it. if i see this book on a man's nightstand, i'm going to point and laugh.

I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words—many of them unfathomable.

Sometimes I judge and consequently love a book based upon the following points:

- A single, beautiful line I longed to read or hear in the words of some person other than me.

- A completely related character.

- A completely unrelated character.

- The way it makes me laugh.

- The way it makes me cry.

- The way it makes me feel extremely good about the life I’m leading.

- The way it makes me feel rich. (metaphor intended)

- The way it makes me feel poor. (----ditto-----)

- When a life is described without much fuss and the death is described without much glory.

- When love is described without much purity and hate is described with a remarkable honesty.

- When a few pages are enough to savor the taste of several slices of fucked up lives.

- When few pages are actually not enough.

- When a writer writes as if it’s the easiest and the most difficult thing to do at the same time.

- When it’s so easy to love a book.

Jesus’ Son met most of the aforementioned criteria and deserved a much better review but I hope you all got my point that I really enjoyed this book. A few hours reading, 11 really short stories basking in the glow of their respective singularities, some connections were made, some were left in isolation but all in all, a book worthy of my time and literary love.

n   No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.n

خوندنش واقعا یکی از تجربه های خوب داستان خوانی ام بود. حتی می تونم بگم ناب. همون قدر که فیلم مرثیه ای برای یک رویای آرنوفسکی توی دوران خودش در سینما کاربرد شیسته ی فرم و محتوا بود این جا هم می شد این رو حس کرد. همونطور که گفتم توی ادبیات روایت های مربوط به افراد معتاد، قرص مصرف کرده، الکلی و متوهم کم داریم و این کتاب که به نظر میاد مجموعه داستان به هم پیوسته است و راوی کل داستان ها یه پسر جوونه. به نظر میاد از این جهت که به خاطر نوع داستانا خیلی سخت می شه به طور قطع این حرف رو زد اما شواهد زیادی هست بر این که راوی یک نفر باشه اول از همه لحنش و به تبع اون نوع تفکرات و احساساتش. دوم اسم افراد و مکان هایی که تکرار می شن به خصوص اون کافه و اون دختر که آنجلیکا بود. سوم هم علاقه ی عجیب شخصیت به روزهای آفتابی یا نور خورشید که توی بیشتر داستان ها تکرار شده.
به شخصه نوع تحلیل های این پسر از دنیا و وقایعش که یه نوعی من رو یاد نوع تفکر شخصیت اصلی کتاب عامه پسند بوکفسکی می انداخت، برام دلنشین بود. یه جور ویژه ی خودش به دنیا می کرد که برای ما جذابیت داره. بعد هم نوع توصیفات به شدت بکر و جالب از دیدگاه اون رو دوست داشتم و مدام به این فکر می کردم که خیلی سخته که بشه یک توهم رو با کلمات توصیف کرد یا نوع نگاه یک آدم معتاد رو به یه پدیده ی ساده ی طبیعت نشون داد. همه ی ما مثلا به غروب خورشید روی دریا نگاه می کنیم اما اون طور دیگه ای این پدیده رو تعبیر می کنه

دیالوگای پینگ پنگی فصل " دستان بی لرزش..." عالی، صریح و به شدت بانمکن. من رو به یاد کارای مک دونا و تارنتینو می انداخت.

این قسمت ممکنه باعث اسپویل بشه:

وقتی به داستان های آخر رسیدم متوجه شدم که کتاب بیشتر از این که یه مجموعه داستان باشه یه رمان کوتاهه. داستان اول با تصادف پسر شروع می شه و در انتهاش ما متوجه می شیم که اون رو توی بیمارستان نگه می دارن و دچار توهم شده. بعد هر کدوم از داستان ها تکه هایی از خاطرات پسرن قبل و بعد از این اتفاق. به خصوص هر چه به سمت انتهایی کتاب می رسیم، متوجه می شیم که نویسنده به نوعی خودنگاری کرده و چیزی شبیه به جریان زندگی و ترک اعتیاد خودش رو نوشته. حتی در فصل یکی مونده به آخر اذعان می کنه که من نویسنده ام و هر چی بگی همون رو جزء به جزء می نویسم. و پاراف انتهایی کار "در میان این همه آدم عجیب و غریب، هر روز حالم بهتر می شد. هیچ وقت نمی دانستم، حتی یک لحظه هم به ذهنم نرسیده بود که شاید برای امثال ما هم جایی باشد."

Excellent prose & a roaming plot to boot. These short stories together describe the grit inherent in modern America. We meet drunks & druggies, victims of crime and a vicious environment. America is rarely portrayed like this-- with so much beauty & ugliness combined. Books like these make me feel bad for hating on The Poets. This is poetic &, despite its brevity, confoundingly major. You want to read more of the narrator's misadventures: it is as addictive to the voracious reader as the drugs and the booze.

Saints standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the fire, perne in a gyre
And be the singing masters of my soul.
W.B. Yeats

This book ROCKS - but too much sex ‘n drugs ‘n Rock ‘n Roll can give you Brain Sin Cavities - if you’re not already aware of that fact.

I guess near the end of his sadly-lamented, too-short life, Johnson’s headspace was all one great Grand Canyon. And when your brain’s a total gap, your life is zapped.

Johnson flushed his in the process. He was on fire inside, you see.

But say, why do we insist at looking down our long noses at the poor depraved souls of Johnson’s inscapes as if they are NOT of our precious world? Our privilege is every bit as stained by the Originary Depravity as is the soul-poverty of Johnson’s more apparent lapses.

I know, Sigmund Freud famously inferred in Civilization and its Discontents that a normal child’s brain picks up the knack of self-installing filters around its more primitive inner voices. To paraphrase Descartes, we’re told we’re good - therefore we are.

That’s the way we’re fitted into these subtle little boxes we live in!

Subtle little bribes of praise.

Just so, we teach kids civics, good hygiene and nice manners. We become perfect. Ya think? Think again.

You’ve gotta be refined in Johnson’s fire first! Cause burning up your phony soul takes time.

Call it purgatorial if, like me, you’re Catholic. But Johnson’s brain in its near-OD’ing psychedelic trips unwittingly added AMPLIFIERS to his more honest blaring purgatorial perceptions. So we get William Burroughs on jet fuel.

That's why I bought this book. I could relate.

You see, as a veteran of chronic bipolar disease (now safely recessive), the severe containment of my meds irrationally from time to time had urged me, as Thomas Pynchon in the great super-Johnsonian novel V., to tear the sky apart with my screams.

Wow, those times were tough: though of course I never actually did it! Because fortunately, eventually I saw my own erroneous egotistic assumptions. And that insight came because I WANTED to be good.

So now, in my Seventies, I take the evening news in bullet-sized snippets. In a word, I’ve become a wimp: but a healthy wimp, now that I’ve finally stayed the long course with my meds. Now they’re my nourishing bread and butter.

I’m no longer curious to hear the news through Denis Johnson’s AMPLIFIERS.

I think we've all been there with him and done that. But, now for me, long ago and far away.

May you find rest, Maestro Johnson - in whatever weird fiery worlds you now find yourself.

Et In semper, frater -

Hail and farewell, dear friend!

And may the Higher Power you always sought grant you final PEACE.

I realised fairly early on in reading this book that I probably wasn’t going to like it very much. Don’t get me wrong, there are many evocative and beautiful passages in the novel, and I do like Johnson’s style and voice— but I honestly found much of the novel to be a rather boring and predictable portrait of addiction and violence rife with frustrating loose ends and tedious soliloquies.

The thing I found most grating about this book was the artsy softboy misogyny. Johnson seems pathologically unable to write any woman without mentioning whether or not his narrator would fuck her. Like, I get it Denis, you've cleverly named the narrator Fuckhead, because he's a fuckhead. I get that we’re not supposed to really like him. It’s just I can’t help but cringe just a little at every sexy bar maid or “seventeen year old belly dancer.” Let’s not even get into the last story, in which Fuckhead becomes enamoured with a random lady whilst peeping through her window to watch her shower. Thanks for clarifying that Fuckhead only “had thoughts of breaking through the glass and raping her,” Denis.

I can’t totally pan this book, because are sections that I found utterly mesmerising. But for every stirring turn of lyrical phrase, there was another phrase like this:

“She was a woman, a traitor and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever loved her.”

And I’d feel my eyes roll into the back of my skull.