miker wrote:
"One thing that surprised me is that, knowing Burroughs's
ties to the beat generation, I expected a mood closer to the
pseudo-intellectual air of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD or DHARMA
BUMS. Not even close."
Junky owes a hell of a lot to Jack Black's You Can't Win, an
autobiographical book about the underworld of hobos and
criminals written just before the turn of the 20th century.
Burroughs read it as an adolescent and it opened up a whole
new world to him. He draws from it in other books, too, but
Junky is clearly modeled after it.
"I understand that Burroughs claim to fame centers on NAKED
LUNCH. I definitely want to read it some day."
Just don't expect anything like Junky. It is not at all a
straight narrative -- very fractured, episodic, doesn't
really have a plot, although it does keep looping back to
certain narrative strains. The story goes that the box with
the manuscript was dropped when Burroughs handed it to Allen
Ginsburg. The two of them shoved the pages back into the box
at random, and Burroughs decided to leave it that way, thus
applying his cut-up strategy to the novel form. I believed
the story the first time I read the book. When I read it
years later, after I had a bit more familiarity with
unorthodox narrative structures, I realized just how
carefully it was fractured, not at all random, and got a lot
more from the book. Didn't lead me to move on to the other
books of his I have on my shelf, though.
Mark
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