Naked Lunch (Harperperennial Classics) (Paperback)

That's my take on this almost impenetrable novel. It's fairly short by today's standards, but like old fashioned toffee - extremely chewy, time consuming and ultimately frustrating in all but small chunks. If the Naked Chef stripped down recipes to their bare essentials, then Naked Lunch is the complete opposite; a gorge-fest of dense, lyrical prose and vivid images melded together to form a collage around the subjects of addiction, sexual fascination and satire of the medical profession.

I gather this book doesn't employ the cut'n'paste narrative experiments of his later work, because with this book there is no coherent narrative. Yes, you could take any of these pages and put them pretty much anywhere and they would still make as much sense. But the cut up method implies a structured (but merely fragmented) narrative as many of us would know it. Naked Lunch is not like this. It is more random, flicking off onto tangents, as dreams do.

Does the sum of these Frankenstein parts add up to a meaningful whole? Well, that depends on what you enjoy in a book. If you enjoy prose loaded with lyrical dexterity, lurid images and simile; constant bemusement, and re-reading sentences because they seem unrelated to each other, with unconnected thoughts and images from one moment to the next - you may enjoy this book. Burroughs has a way with images, if nothing else. But if you are used to more conventional writing and narrative - a story even - then, like me, you may find it a frustrating experience. If James Joyce was a junkie, he would probably have written something like Naked Lunch first.

But I could not leave it alone, and persevered in small portions. The writing is intriguing and the images fascinating, but I was only 2-3 pages in when I wondered when the weirdness would stop and a book would begin. Maybe that is the triumph of Burroughs' work, that many will read it in spite of its avant garde nature. For those who find it heavy going, 'Junky', written earlier, may help. It foreshadows the style and experiences employed in Naked Lunch, but has a conventional narrative and gives some useful background to Burroughs' psyche, before he completely tripped out.

This novel charts the underworld, the lowlife- mostly in a manner we have not seen before...Written in Tangiers, edited by Allen Ginsberg, this is a Beat-artefact and an advance for the form of the novel on a par with Beckett & B S Johnson...It is also darkly amusing, though you may want to dip in and out, rather than read it like a conventional novel...It would initiate Burrough's use of Gysin's cut-up method and lead us to such excellent succesors as 'The Soft Machine' & 'The Ticket that Exploded' (the true cut-up works)...It would influence film-makers (Cronenberg, Roeg) & pop-stars (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, David Bowie...)...It picks up & distorts the road created by 'Tropic of Cancer', 'Hunger', 'The Man with the Golden Arm', 'The Subterraneans', 'Our Lady of the Flowers', 'The Sheltering Sky', 'Howl' and so many other screaming texts...Even if you don't like it, you'll like it: at this price it would be a great loss not to own this masterpiece...

Read it only to see why writers like Irvine Welsh are p***ing in the wind, when writing on the topic of drugs...Burrough's writes for the future, in a futurist manner: Annexia is the ultimate fusion of Kafka & Orwell...

A classic... "Wouldn't you?"