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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Small doses before bed may work best, 30 Dec 2003
By A Customer
Imagine you were able to recall all the weird dreams and nightmares you ever had in clear, vivid detail; taking in sights, smells, feelings, and those odd moments when the dream changes completely, but still - inconceivably, but somehow rationally - connected to the events of the moment before. Imagine you are a hopeless heroin addict, having sleeping and waking dreams compounded by an addict's hallucinations and paranoid excursions, often perceiving things through a trancelike psychosis. Imagine you have a pen in your hand. You've imagined William Burroughs disturbed, distorted and dreamlike prose. You've imagined what Naked Lunch would look and sound like.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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bug-powder dust & mugwump jism!, 20 Aug 2001
'Naked Lunch'(title courtesy of Jack Kerouac)is one of the key works of the 20th century...It is a reason why J G Ballard called Burroughs 'the lineal succesor to James Joyce' (tho' it is more readable than 'Finnegans Wake'!)...Along with the almost-straightforward autobiographies 'Junky' & 'Queer', 'N.L.' is the ideal introduction to Burroughs oeuvre.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?"
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A journey into paradox, 9 Sep 2007
It took me several weeks to get into this book: then I got to half-way and suddenly felt comfortable with the style and the remainder got gobbled up in a couple of days. It is a very different "novel", and one which certainly won't appeal to everyone - particularly unsuitable for immature readers or religious fundamentalists of any persuasion. There is extensive explicit reference to heroin use and homosexuality throughout, with an often sadomasochistic or twisted medical angle.
The book's plot is loose to say the least, and the stream of consciousness style caused me great difficulty in the early stages. Once I realised that this was the books strength and started going with the flow, it became much easier to read and was highly enjoyable. Although the subject matter is often disturbing and the characters generally frightening and detestable, the prose is beautiful and often very poetic. Loose concepts such as Interzone, Islam Corp, Dr Benway etc are intimated like pieces of exquisite modern art.
If you think you won't huff and puff due to the references to homosexuality, drugs, casual violence, and florid prose, give this dizzying journey into dark beatnik fantasy a go. And hope you never have a GP called Benway...
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