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Kerouac's avatar, Sal Paradise, follows Dean Moriarty, a hollow messiah of the age, and together they haunt jazz and bop clubs trying to capture "it" and waxing ecstatically about saxophonists blowing. Look at Sal talking about a woman as if she were a breed of cat he wanted to rescue from the animal shelter.
Anctil, Gabriel (5 September 2007). "Le Devoir: 50 years of On The Road—Kerouac wanted to write in French". Le Devoir (in French). Quebec, Canada . Retrieved 2010-12-13. From the get go, this is a stream of consciousness romp through North America. It seems like almost every city in the United States is mentioned at least once as Sal Paradise tells of his travels, the people he meets, those who join him, and his wild vagabond companion Dean Moriarity. I don't feel like the style of this book will appeal to everyone and I can easily see many losing interest part way in. But, if you are a fan of travelling in America, a scholar of literary genres, a hipster, and/or grew up in the 50s travelling the great American highways before interstates, you will find something in here for you.As for the beauty, the story of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing the US again and again with a last trip down to Mexico City is epic. I read OTR in my teens, which were spread all over the end of the 60's and the beginning of the 70's. One time I ate only pie for an entire week. I was driving across the country with my buddies, and we decided to eat only pie.”
The review from Time exhibited a similar sentiment. "The post-World War II generation—beat or beatific—has not found symbolic spokesmen with anywhere near the talents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Nathanael West. In this novel, talented Author Kerouac, 35, does not join that literary league, either, but at least suggests that his generation is not silent. With his barbaric yawp of a book, Kerouac commands attention as a kind of literary James Dean." [21] It considers the book partly a travel book and partly a collection of journal jottings. While Kerouac sees his characters as "mad to live ... desirous of everything at the same time," the reviewer likens them to cases of "psychosis that is a variety of Ganser Syndrome" who "aren't really mad—they only seem to be." [21] Critical study [ edit ] a b c Brooks, David (October 2, 2007). "Sal Paradise at 50". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 April 2012. The beginning of this book was promising. I thought it was going to be like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it wasn’t funny. Then Sal’s pals are off again, by bus, on foot, by thumb, roaming the continent, feeling the wind of Wyoming nights and the heat of Texas days, looking for Moriarty’s never-to-be-found father or anyone’s sister, always expecting the ultimate in music or love or understanding around the next bend in the road. Excitement and movement mean everything. Steady jobs and homes in the suburbs are for the “squares.”
The hallucinatory descriptions of trips, both physical and psychological are still entrancing and often poetic, even when they are incoherent. As an ode to freewheeling youth, it has moments of inspiring and lyrical bravado. But I can’t escape the knowledge that all of Sal Paradise’s promises are empty, and that Kerouac never truly found what he was looking for. I found it a chore to read, a long dull boast about a series of road trips. It's populated by vacuous largely despicable alcoholics with zero impulse control and an unshakeable belief that they are deeply profound observers of the human condition. The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. I would only add that this clean text, rendered in a standard format, was published about five years later; the political and economic context of the USA was different. And the crazy American youth who discovered it then found there may be different aspirations—those of Kerouac when he was writing this novel. Mr. KEROUAC: Uproars of music and the tenorman had it. And everybody knew he had it. And Dean was clutching his head in the crowd and it was a mad crowd. And they were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes.
An interesting thing that happened while listening to this is twice I thought "this is reminding me of Hemingway" and less than a minute later, Hemingway is mentioned. It really reminded me of The Sun Also Rises and Wkipedia mentions that Kerouac did intentionally use the style of that book for On The Road. Letto da adolescente conteneva la voglia di movimento e cambiamento che era in me. La rabbia e la ribellione. La gioventù e l’amore.The instance above differed from the popular modern instances by employing the forms “writers” and “typists” instead of “writing” and “typing’. Capote was criticizing a group of authors, but only one was named during the interview: And this is that book which has shamed me into feigning an air of ignorance every time I browsed any of the countless 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die lists. The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." [1] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. [2] Production and publication [ edit ] Negli anni a seguire ho incontrato tante voci che di Kerouac si facevano beffe: un personaggio, più che uno scrittore, dicevano.
I deeply cherish but don't know that I fully agree with Truman Capote's assessment: that _ On the Road_ "is not writing at all -- it's typing."
And this is not to mention the countless instances of 'get you a girl', 'get girls', 'Let's get a girl' and other minor variations of the same strewn throughout the length of the book and some of Sal's thoughts about 'queers' which are equally revolting. Its importance in itself, too, has faded. The Beats live on as myth that surpasses, for the most part, their actual output in both resonance and quality. Moreover, their myth has been adapted, especially in popular music, so well that it has rendered a lot of their actual work trivial, especially the lesser Beats (in terms of talent), eg. Kerouac. Nobody needs to read On the Road anymore, and all it's going to do is perpetuate some pretty idiotic notions we already have enough of, and lead to a lot of ripoffs of ripoffs of Whitman thinking their poetry is important and crowding bars I don't want to have to see them at. a b James Mottram (12 September 2008). "The long and grinding story of On The Road". The Independent. Archived from the original on June 1, 2009.
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