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Product Description
Book Description
"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight.
"This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." —Allen Ginsberg
About the Author
Jack Kerouac(1922-1969), the central figure of the Beat Generation, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 and died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969. Among his many novels are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Visions of Cody.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I'M RIDING ALONG with Tristessa in the cab, drunk, with big bottle of Juarez Bourbon whiskey in the till-bag railroad lootbag they'd accused me of holding in railroad 1952-here I am in Mexico City, rainy Saturday night, mysteries, old dream sidestreets with no names reeling in, the little street where I'd walked through crowds of gloomy Hobo Indians wrapped in tragic shawls enough to make you cry and you thought you saw knives flashing beneath the folds-lugubrious dreams as tragic as the one of Old Railroad Night where my father sits big of thighs in smoking car of night, outside's a brakeman with red light and white light, lumbering in the sad vast mist tracks of life-but now I'm up on that Vegetable plateau Mexico, the moon of Citlapol a few nights earlier I'd stumbled to on the sleepy roof on the way to the ancient dripping stone toilet-Tristessa is high, beautiful as ever, goin home gayly to go to bed and enjoy her morphine. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I'M RIDING ALONG with Tristessa in the cab, drunk, with big bottle of Juarez Bourbon whiskey in the till-bag railroad lootbag they'd accused me of holding in railroad 1952-here I am in Mexico City, rainy Saturday night, mysteries, old dream sidestreets with no names reeling in, the little street where I'd walked through crowds of gloomy Hobo Indians wrapped in tragic shawls enough to make you cry and you thought you saw knives flashing beneath the folds-lugubrious dreams as tragic as the one of Old Railroad Night where my father sits big of thighs in smoking car of night, outside's a brakeman with red light and white light, lumbering in the sad vast mist tracks of life-but now I'm up on that Vegetable plateau Mexico, the moon of Citlapol a few nights earlier I'd stumbled to on the sleepy roof on the way to the ancient dripping stone toilet-Tristessa is high, beautiful as ever, goin home gayly to go to bed and enjoy her morphine. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Romance that could never Be,
By William Bradford (Palos Park, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tristessa (Paperback)
The first thing that struck me about this book was the way it ends. It ends with an ellipsis. How many books to you read that end like that? Not many would be my guess. As for the story this book is more about the voice of Kerouac. He is exposing more of himself than in any other book. The book is less about a story and more about to be Kerouac in Mexico, without anything to give him comfort. Rather he is lost in himself, drunk and confused. He finds a woman who he wants to be with. Someone he can hold someone her can touch, yet the problems lies in the fact that he can't tell her. Yet you can read between the lines and see a man who is giving up upon himself. Faced with uncertainty, wavering from his strong Buddhist beliefs. This book is more personal than I ever knew. This book can almost be seen as Kerouac moving against what he believed. Everything comes into question. The fact that Tristessa is addicted to drugs, plays on the point of what is he to do? On the one hand he loves her and on the other he can't bring himself to tell her that. I have loved this book from the first time I read it when I was a junior in high school. The beauty of this book is amazing can never be stated enough. This is a must read for any Kerouac fan.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
If I could only . . .,
By Real Name Attribution (There you are . . .) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tristessa (Paperback)
. . . recommend three books that you should read, "Tristessa" would be one of them. The other two? McCrae's "Katzenjammer" and Burrough's "Naked Lunch." Are any of them alike? No. But that's the point. All are different, yet all three break new ground. "Tristessa" is one of my favs, though, and I do like other Kerouacs as well. The story of a Mexican prostitute and a little bit of everything else, this is probably Kerouac's most "romantic" effort, and that's a stretch. Not a long book, it is nevertheless an amazing portrait of "ships that pass in the night" missing each other. Not just for those who are into the "beat" generation, "Tristessa" is more from the heart than any other Kerouac novel.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
On Tristessa,
By "boywithnailsinhiseyes" (CA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tristessa (Paperback)
Well, Jack Kerouac does it again with his beautifully melancholic, poetic prose. His descriptions of something as simple as the floor where he stays is enough to draw tears. His wonderfully drug-induced rantings of the beauty of "morphina" and the Virgin Mary Statuette are emotionally charged enough to make anyone a spiritual drug-addicted Buddhist with Catholic images and intense philosophical thought. Definitely worth reading.
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