Naked Lunch (Hardcover)

That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader.

So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge).

Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century.

The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end.

A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.

This book is one wild ride, and as I said, should be read as a poetic scrapbook. Burroughs' contributions to all forms of media have been absolutely invaluable. This book was declared innocent of obscenity charges by the United States Supreme Court in 1959, and thus are we allowed to cuss (to an extent) on TV and on the radio. Burroughs made a great leap for free speech that is still being felt today: if a work uses questionable material within contextual merit, then it is not obscene. And NAKED LUNCH is anything but a hemmorhage of the imagination.

The role of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavor, the role of the writer as idol-breaker, and the very form of writing itself. His work is hard to access, and very much an acquired taste. But when you acquire the taste....the world never looks the same. Pick up a copy of this great book, and take your time. If nothing else you're bound to appreciate the exotic settings, Burroughs' imagination, his dry caustic wit, and some gorgeous surreal visuals: i.e. take in the Mugwumps (p.46): if this is not worth the price of a book, nothing is! Another cult novel I'd like to suggest is THE LOSERS CLUB: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez