Customer Reviews

Big Sur

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Why more people aren't drawn to this book, along with Mr. K's DESOLATION ANGELS, is beyond me. Forget about ONE THE ROAD--I read it years ago and didn't see what all the noise was about. So perhaps that's why I came to this book not expecting much . . . and got a lot more. The greatest piece of literature ever written? No, but it is a great chronicle, and a superb example of the "beat" generation's wordsmithery (if that even is such a word). If you're a fan of Kerouac, don't miss this book. If not, I'd suggest starting with DESOLATION ANGELS first.

Also recommended: Katzenjammer by McCrae, Post Office by Bukowski, and Naked Lunch by Burroughs

Though not my absolute favorite Kerouac novel, I can honestly say once again that I loved every bit of it(if you want some of my overall favorite Kerouac work, check out On The Road or The Dharma Bums). It was, though, one of the quickest flowing books to read. Big Sur grabs you and drags you vigorously through the psychotic barriers of Kerouac's impending insanity, and will not let go until you have completed the extremely intense final chapters. Kerouac also included at the end of the book a poem entitled "Sea" that he wrote while observing the ocean at Big Sur.

Read Big Sur. It is an amazing work of literature, and is guaranteed to catch hold of you from the very first page. And if you enjoy this, do not stop there. I recommend anything with Jack Kerouac's name on the cover. Take my word.

Also recommended: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

This book was written after all the damage had been done, and you can feel it as you read the book. Jack tried for years to get his writing out and by the time it was published he was well on to the state of mind you read in "BIG SUR".
I really think this is a brilliant book, you get to experience a bit of the torment he put himself through to get away from the critics that called his work childish. You even get to hear about Neal Cassady ten years after "ON THE ROAD".
A book well worth reading, slowly, Jack had a tendency to run paragraphs and sentences together, a technique he uses quite a bit in this book.

Jack Kerouac was one of the most dynamic figures in literary history. He was also one of America's greatest authors--he gave us two of the finest books written, _On the Road_ and _The Dharma Bums_, but _Big Sur_ shows that even he could write poorly. Big Sur is a stream of consciousness novel ... that deals with his alcoholism--though looking at the way Kerouac died, writing it taught him nothing. It doesn't contain the energy or the story that we find in On the Road of Dharma Bums. It's Kerouac's attempt at postmodernism and at showing us what his alcoholism was like. Kerouac is successful in that the confusion and nonlinear narrative does effectively show the confusion (...) of his alcoholism, but as a work of literature, it just fell short. I suppose the book is important in its portrayal of alcoholism and as a piece of Kerouac's work, but it just wasn't that enjoyable, and I was happy when it ended.

A final note, Kerouac closes the novel with his (too) long poem "Sea" which was written when the events of this novel took place. It's a bad poem...

On the back cover Ginsberg says some wonderful, and true things about Kerouac's writing. But Big Sur doesn't seem to fit the bill.

While I'm a fan of virtually any beat writers' works, I'm partial to books by Jack Kerouac. This one is the one that touched my soul the most. Worn down by alcohol and drugs, he bounces in and out of sanity, and everything he writes comes from the truest, rawest part of his pain. After reading this I took a roadtrip to Big Sur and even stopped in his old hangout, Nepenthe. I bought a journal there and started writing like mad. Thanks for the inspiration, Jack!

Some of his most beautiful & poetic lyrics in this memoir and at the same time very real, scary and certainly dark in large sections--it's a paranoid view of the world that precedes what the Bay Area has indeed turned into, covering great speedways down the Bay Shore Freeway (280) from Los Gatos and San Jose and up into the City, Frisco and the comercialism and hangers on that delude and ruin every scene, perverted and idealistic, glorious and sorrowful ... and the poetry on the beach is just wonderful, Jack's translations of the Pacific Ocean into the English language.

It's taken me about a year to process this book, having read it during a three-week motorcycle tour of the West in the summer of 2001. Big Sur is a much more mature work than On the Road. Kerouac was just finding his voice in On the Road. In Big Sur, he was dipping his pen into a very deep well of life experience that included shattered illusions and the horrors of alcoholism. By the time he wrote Big Sur, Kerouac had become a celebrity - something he never came to terms with - and he was a profoundly unbalanced and unhappy man. Nonetheless, he had an astonishing ability to get experiences that defy verbalization onto the page. His perceptions, especially in the throes of alcohol addiction, are incredibly acute and precise. Even if the events and conversations are complete fabrications, they ring of truth and reality and insight.
This is not an "easy" book, but it's a real milestone in 20th century American literature.

Someone else reviewed this book and said it is better than 'On the Road'. I completey agree. I would like to add that if you are new to Kerouac, this book is not the one to begin with. I think the only way to really get it is to read other books by him, namely, 'On the Road'. Jack Kerouac is an amazing writer, and this book is just that, AMAZING. His free spirited character from 'OTR' is deconstructed to a point that is real and in your face. This book is dark but it opens the readers eyes to what the real Jack Kerouac was like.

In this novel Keroauc starts to explore the possibilty
that he had become a victim of the caricature which he
had invented and chosen to portray. Inspired by Jack
London, he invented this personna whose disquise
he proudly modeled, forgetting the Zen imperative of
quiet detachment. He had painted himself into the
proverbal corner and the beautiful anquish laddened
writing exposes the pain this awareness instilled in him.
Let the world remember him for "On the Road", this book
is the one which I would choose to read in order to tap
into the realizations which he had made in his waning years.

By the time I had made it to Kerouac's Big Sur, I had already traveled through the pages of On The Road and The Dharma Bums. It was fascinating to observe Kerouac's transformation from one book to the next. In Big Sur, Kerouac moves beyond the idealistic explorations of his earlier work and begins forming conclusions about the meaning of life. And he doesn't like what he's found -- that the meaning of life is life itself -- that his physical substance is the manifestation of evolution, genetics, and fractal probability -- and that the evolution he's discovered is far more than an evolution from monkeys, lung-fish, or single-celled creatures -- but, instead, he seems to contemplate his evolution from the infinitely-old dust of the cosmoses -- that every sub-atomic particle making up his being has been made and remade a trillion times into countless other forms -- part of a tree, part of a rock, liquid metal in a subterranean pool, little creatures fighting for food -- and all of this on a thousand other worlds, over unimaginable expanses of time. When Kerouac contemplates all of this, and the relative unlikelihood of his existence, he is overwhelmed by his responsibility to the singleness of his circumstance. He feels he's been wasting his life "writing down useless sounds." of the world.

For who? For what?

This is where he seems to slip into some kind of Catholic-Zen-Buddhist insanity, and has the big existential crisis that eventually drives him to detachment, alcoholism, and an early grave. Without a doubt we should be grateful that he compounds the big dents his very existence has made in the existential-probability curve, and bothers to write his thoughts down for us to consider.

He dared to look into the eyes of his God and was blasted into a million little pieces by the power of what he saw as the total truth.

The miracle of Kerouac's writing is how he never actually says any of these things, but undeniably hints at them by discussing the usefulness of the 25-cent scrub pad he uses to do his dishes. It is Kerouac's relationship to his environment that tells the story. His understanding and reaction to the virtues and corruptions of the world (including his own) is the fuel that powers his pen.