I've said that Naked Lunch is the Rosetta Stone work by my favorite author for so long now its hard for me to know if either proposition is true anymore. It's been a number of years since I'd had read any of his works. The release of the first ever audio edition of his most famous, if not his finest, artistic artifact seemed the perfect opportunity for re-visitation. William Lee is a junky running West from the law. His consciousness slowly segues itself into a nightmare world called the Interzone. The chapters are in random order so the reader is constantly navigating shades of gray between “reality” so called and the Interzone. Burroughs calls upon his life long struggles with heroin addiction illustrate how all of are addicted and controlled by something, most importantly the controllers are addicted to controlling and the controlled addicted to being controlled. The majority of the scenarios Burroughs envisions are too horrific or obscene for me to mention here. They also are terribly funny. You'll be laughing your way past the graveyard and needle filled garbage dump. Like when “all American deanxietized man” is brought before the “international conference of technological psychiatry” and reduced to the ectoplasmic homicidal centipede he really is. As most critics have argued, Naked Lunch is a satire and Interzone is actually represents a place for more real than any of us would like to admit. It's the place were all our fears and most cynical assumptions about medicine, government, sex, and law are painfully true.The book is not some much pornographic as it is grotesque and it is not without good reason that Burroughs work is often compared with that of the painter Hieronymous Bosch. There is surrealism and there is horror but there is not sexual arousal. If it is pornography, it is pornography for psychopaths. Personally, I encountered this work as a teenager and after reading it any possibility of abusing opiate drugs was out the window. Since then I've only had to laugh/grimace at the thin veiled glamorization of heroin addiction that blossoms in the media every few years. Burroughs taught me early about the black putrid zombie death world addiction will transport you to. It won't transport you to hipster cruising with Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto. Praise be to Blackstone Audio for hiring Mark Bramhall, a reader who understands the tone of the work and brings enough verve to enliven material that can be very difficult. In a lot of ways, it is a work that is meant to be read aloud. The most psychotic chapters are prose poem rants that need a certain umph in the delivery. Bramhall knows when to turn it on and off. His interpretation of some of my most beloved denizens grated me a bit (why give Dr. Benway a Texas accent), but this probably due to my being overly familiar with the material. Blackstone also did right releasing an audio edition of the so-called “restored text” which puts the novel itself first, and all the various introductions and appendices that have appeared over the years as supplemental materials in the back. For concerned parties this supplemental material will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the writing and publication of this singular work. My final verdict: Naked Lunch remains the bug bomb of 20th century America. If your house has yet to fumigated, it's time to call the exterminator.
Show lessI've said that Naked Lunch is the Rosetta Stone work by my favorite author for so long now its hard for me to know if either proposition is true anymore. It's been a number of years since I'd had read any of his works. The release of the first ever audio edition of his most famous, if not his finest, artistic artifact seemed the perfect opportunity for re-visitation. William Lee is a junky running West from the law. His consciousness slowly segues itself into a nightmare world called the Interzone. The chapters are in random order so the reader is constantly navigating shades of gray between “reality” so called and the Interzone. Burroughs calls upon his life long struggles with heroin addiction illustrate how all of are addicted and controlled by something, most importantly the controllers are addicted to controlling and the controlled addicted to being controlled. The majority of the scenarios Burroughs envisions are too horrific or obscene for me to mention here. They also are terribly funny. You'll be laughing your way past the graveyard and needle filled garbage dump. Like when “all American deanxietized man” is brought before the “international conference of technological psychiatry” and reduced to the ectoplasmic homicidal centipede he really is. As most critics have argued, Naked Lunch is a satire and Interzone is actually represents a place for more real than any of us would like to admit. It's the place were all our fears and most cynical assumptions about medicine, government, sex, and law are painfully true.The book is not some much pornographic as it is grotesque and it is not without good reason that Burroughs work is often compared with that of the painter Hieronymous Bosch. There is surrealism and there is horror but there is not sexual arousal. If it is pornography, it is pornography for psychopaths. Personally, I encountered this work as a teenager and after reading it any possibility of abusing opiate drugs was out the window. Since then I've only had to laugh/grimace at the thin veiled glamorization of heroin addiction that blossoms in the media every few years. Burroughs taught me early about the black putrid zombie death world addiction will transport you to. It won't transport you to hipster cruising with Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto. Praise be to Blackstone Audio for hiring Mark Bramhall, a reader who understands the tone of the work and brings enough verve to enliven material that can be very difficult. In a lot of ways, it is a work that is meant to be read aloud. The most psychotic chapters are prose poem rants that need a certain umph in the delivery. Bramhall knows when to turn it on and off. His interpretation of some of my most beloved denizens grated me a bit (why give Dr. Benway a Texas accent), but this probably due to my being overly familiar with the material. Blackstone also did right releasing an audio edition of the so-called “restored text” which puts the novel itself first, and all the various introductions and appendices that have appeared over the years as supplemental materials in the back. For concerned parties this supplemental material will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the writing and publication of this singular work. My final verdict: Naked Lunch remains the bug bomb of 20th century America. If your house has yet to fumigated, it's time to call the exterminator.
Read more...
This is the first book I have read of his & the guy is a NUT JOB!!!! Though it is a realtively small book, it took a couple of weeks to read orig. intro.'s & additions by the author along with the texts annexed by the editors.In the chapters that weren't overtly sexually descriptive, Burroughs writes with such delineation that I started to wonder how much of the delineation was true and factual and how much was just his f___ed up, drug induced imagination'This book took longer to read because it was sooo....I don't know the right word?! The writing is intense interesting & requires intelligience to read. My problem was that it didn' t seem to be a story, just a random set of chapters in the same book; or something like that.
Show lessThis is the first book I have read of his & the guy is a NUT JOB!!!! Though it is a realtively small book, it took a couple of weeks to read orig. intro.'s & additions by the author along with the texts annexed by the editors.In the chapters that weren't overtly sexually descriptive, Burroughs writes with such delineation that I started to wonder how much of the delineation was true and factual and how much was just his f___ed up, drug induced imagination'This book took longer to read because it was sooo....I don't know the right word?! The writing is intense interesting & requires intelligience to read. My problem was that it didn' t seem to be a story, just a random set of chapters in the same book; or something like that.
Read more...
Throughout this book there were a number of times where I thought “This book is exactly what I expected and at the same time nothing like I expected”. Now that I've finished it I can think of no better way to sum up my feelings towards it. Burroughs penned this work while suffering from a very severe addiction to “junk” and as a result the book does not follow a traditional narrative and I often had no idea where he was going to take me next or whether or not what I was reading was part of the story or just a random thought that had materialized in his heroin addicted mind. Though this could make it difficult to read at times it also made it exciting and surprising.The parts I found the most well written and clear, often revolved around descriptions of fictional dystopian communities. I found these sections chilling and they effectively communicated how little faith Burroughs held in humanity (or the “human virus”). Of these sections the descriptions of the world Annexia and that of the Divisionists and their replicas were my favourite and the paranoid idea of the future held within those passages made me want to keep reading.I do believe that this book is an amazing piece of literature, even in the midst of chaos Burroughs manages to find moments of clarity which truly reveal the dark and twisted world he was buried in. For example on page 56, when he states “I woke up with someone squeezing my hand, it was my other hand”. Nevertheless, there were still parts that disgusted me or that I thought were unnecessary and although later a sober Burroughs tried to explain the satire of characters like the Mugwump, I am still not convinced.It is a book that you need to go into being prepared for whatever it will throw at you. It is one for which you will need to forget what a novel is supposed to be. It will most definitely shock and surprise as you follow Burroughs twisted “narrative” to...well to nowhere really. If you get the chance, the afterword written by a sober Burroughs later in life is a sobering finale which reminds us that this wasn't just a book but a living nightmare. At the beginning of Naked Lunch, Burroughs himself unknowingly provides us with, what I think is the most accurate way to describe his writing. He states “be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary”. That is exactly what this book is, arbitrary and bizarre but at the same time the most accurate account Burroughs could give into the mind of a junkie.
Show lessThroughout this book there were a number of times where I thought “This book is exactly what I expected and at the same time nothing like I expected”. Now that I've finished it I can think of no better way to sum up my feelings towards it. Burroughs penned this work while suffering from a very severe addiction to “junk” and as a result the book does not follow a traditional narrative and I often had no idea where he was going to take me next or whether or not what I was reading was part of the story or just a random thought that had materialized in his heroin addicted mind. Though this could make it difficult to read at times it also made it exciting and surprising.The parts I found the most well written and clear, often revolved around descriptions of fictional dystopian communities. I found these sections chilling and they effectively communicated how little faith Burroughs held in humanity (or the “human virus”). Of these sections the descriptions of the world Annexia and that of the Divisionists and their replicas were my favourite and the paranoid idea of the future held within those passages made me want to keep reading.I do believe that this book is an amazing piece of literature, even in the midst of chaos Burroughs manages to find moments of clarity which truly reveal the dark and twisted world he was buried in. For example on page 56, when he states “I woke up with someone squeezing my hand, it was my other hand”. Nevertheless, there were still parts that disgusted me or that I thought were unnecessary and although later a sober Burroughs tried to explain the satire of characters like the Mugwump, I am still not convinced.It is a book that you need to go into being prepared for whatever it will throw at you. It is one for which you will need to forget what a novel is supposed to be. It will most definitely shock and surprise as you follow Burroughs twisted “narrative” to...well to nowhere really. If you get the chance, the afterword written by a sober Burroughs later in life is a sobering finale which reminds us that this wasn't just a book but a living nightmare. At the beginning of Naked Lunch, Burroughs himself unknowingly provides us with, what I think is the most accurate way to describe his writing. He states “be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary”. That is exactly what this book is, arbitrary and bizarre but at the same time the most accurate account Burroughs could give into the mind of a junkie.
Read more...
