Fritz

Kerouac's nervous breakdown, takes you up and down into the twists and turns of his inner most honest thoughts. Thoughts of death and dying and life and living. The triumphant beat generation comes to an end. The bouts of drinking and madness turned to thinking and sadness.

A requiem for the kind of life that takes no no for an answer that never stops to think, but just cruises down the highway at a 100 mph.

It is uncanny, the amount of effort to break the madness and the futility of it all and to have the feeling that this book could have been written now. In a world of sad millennials who are dissapointed about their life and opportunities and the people who try to break the mould.

I loved it and binged it, as my generation does.

What an utter load of hautain silliness. It's quasi-spiritual and semi-intellectual, but fails at both. There were some interesting themes. But most of the story was conveyed in vague descriptions.

To top that he pretends to be very faithful to his wife while clearly being infatuated with the naked woman sitting on his lap (where invited her to sit). Which is a bizarrely dissonant thing to uphold as true.

Do not recommend this.

What can I say, I was not in fact blown away, as some people have described it to me.

The fun thing to me about the book was, that I did know anything about the story until I started. The post-apocalyptic style thus took me by surprise and was one of the little surprises in the book.

At times I felt that the story was not going anywhere. But then it did it so well, that I kept reading. Then there were a few more gems. The intricacies of the desolate protagonist telling himself and his son that they are the good guys, while in fact they are very similar if not the same as most of the people they meet. The times the slow journey was relieved with supplies and a place to rest.

In conclusion. Nice minimalism in the dialogue and pace in the story.

Oh yeah, and what the f*** was up with the last paragraph. After all this simple minimal train-of-thought kind of dialogues and factual description, the last paragraph all of a sudden is a bit of beautiful deep poetic prose completely out of place.

Malcom Gladwell gets a lot of flak, about not getting the facts “straight”. Which I think is not really what he's trying to do. He's not a researcher as much as an essayist. So whether or not he got the science right is not very important to me as a reader. Although it would be a waste if certain falsehoods become a publicly accepted fact.

Regarding it as an essay I enjoyed reading Gladwell's optimistic style of combining certain stories to create a common thread. I didn't care much for the gimmick of starting a story very positively and asking a rhetoric question like: “He should be proud of what he achieved right? Everything is great now”. And then appending: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

On the whole I enjoyed the premise of the book. Giants can be defeated. And being smaller or weaker does not have to be the end of it. It can also mean that you can be more creative and still outwit someone.
It might sound super obvious, but it is nice to be reminded of it. People will never voluntarily choose a path of more resistance like dyslexia, or worse. But adversity does cultivate cunning and creativity.

This book was marvelous, fantastic and legendary characters, great build up. Wonderful storytelling.

I should read this again in English (they didn't have it at the local library in English). Perhaps it will gain 5 stars then.