Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me: Amazon.ca: Richard Farina, Thomas Pynchon: Books

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This is the ultimate novel of college life during the first hallucinatory flowering of what has famously come to be known as The Sixties. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me follows haunted ur-hippy Gnossos Pappadopoulis upon return to his old university town that's just tilting into a new era, and Gnossos' involvement in a swirl of sixties-style drug taking and the search for love and the meaning of it all. It is a hilarious and haunting book.

Book Description

Fariña evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering—among other things—mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth. A portrait of an explosive decade, sparkling with inventive writing and conveying the essence of a generation, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, as Thomas Pynchon writes in the introduction, "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch."

"A marvelous storyteller, Fariña is fit to join the company of Kerouac, Kesey, and Pynchon." —San Francisco Chronicle

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
Young Gnossos Pappadopoulis, furry Pooh Bear, keeper of the flame, voyaged back from the asphalt seas of the great wasted land: oh highways U.S. 40 and unyielding 66, I am home to the glacier-gnawed gorges, the fingers of lakes, the golden girls of Westchester and Shaker Heights. Read the first page

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Concordance

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

26 Reviews

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (26 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars I find all the high reviews incomprehensible, Jan 1 2004

By

"johnmarshall64" (Anywhere but here) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Paperback)

What gives with all the 5 star reviews? Many of the reviewers look like they are good readers apart from this one, but I find the strong reviews incomprehensible. I love Dylan, the Beats, Joyce, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and a host of avant-garde and Bohemian writers, so I feel I have some cred on this kind of book. But I cannot find much of value in this particular book. I thought it was primarily boring and tedious, and couldn't find any of the humor others here write about. To me it came across as a piece of self-indulgent writing by an inexperienced author.

I'm quite sad that Farina died so young, and I wish he had lived long enough to develop his writing (and music), but I have to say that based on this, I can't find much to admire. I find him to be weak as a prose stylist and dreadful at characterization.

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5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books of the 20th century, Aug 9 2002

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Matthew T. Harrison (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Paperback)

What can i say, the only people with anything bad to say about it are right wing nutjobs or fools who actually believe Joyce's Ulysses has a message.
This hilarious novel is about a campus legend, a legit student leader, who is used by politcal opportunists to gain power. All in all, a brilliant forshadowing of the later 60's student movement.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Shows what might have been, Jun 9 2002

By

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Paperback)

Unrefined at times as it is, for a first novel this is far better than anything I could ever do. Say what you want about Farina, but this novel swaggers with the confidence that only a young punk can have, daring you to deny that it's not the greatest novel ever written. It's not, but it is highly entertaining and evocative of the spirit of the times (or any time, really) even if the events and characters are almost comically outlandish. Set mostly around a college campus just as the Sixties are dawning, it tells the story of Gnossus, a man who just wants to be Exempt, who makes his way through the turbulant times by simply trying to do his own thing, whether other folks care or not. It's a credit to Farina that he can make the reader even sympathize a little bit with a character as obtuse as Gnossus, who tends to act only for himself, treat other characters in a random fashion and spend more time as a bystander than a participant. Yet care we do, if only because we want the things that Gnossus wants, to be apart from everything, to try and live life to its fullest while remaining above all the nasty chaos that life tends to throw at you. This is a novel that succeeds mostly on atmosphere and sheer determination, since the plot can at best be described as ramshackle, not quite episodic but not quite directed either, it bounces from scene to scene with apparent purpose but also like a hyperactive toddler, which can be engaging or very annoying depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing. What makes the book really work for me though is Farina's prose . . . maybe it's meaningless babble but for me it really hopes to set the mood, with odd shifts in sentence rhythm, witty asides and strange play on words, but at the same time he's utterly capable of imbuing a scene with great emotion and care and his descriptions are wonderfully different, off kilter but still able to convey vibrant images. In the end, it's the spirit of fun that infuses this book that makes me look so fondly on it. It's the work of someone who felt he could do anything and if he had lived, maybe he would have shown us that he could. Either way, this book stands to show that the possibility was there. Most people who read this probably came by way of Thomas Pynchon's recommendation (that's the way I came) but their styles aren't similar at all. This is equally enjoyable, just for the different reasons and stands on its own as a hallmark of literature from the last half century.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Inconceivably overrated
I hate to be blunt, but if you think this is a masterpiece, you need to be introduced to some masterpieces. James Joyce's ULYSSES is a masterpiece. Read more

Published on Jan 25 2004 by Belinda Milner

2.0 out of 5 stars A severe disappointment - here are the reasons why
I was really was expecting to like this novel. I am a huge fan of Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Burroughs, Pynchon, and a slew of other similar and related writers, so I... Read more

Published on Mar 15 2002 by Robert Moore