Big Sur
Ratings29
Average rating3.6
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.
A chronicle of a mental breakdown. This is the first thing I've read by Kerouac and I think there's more of a debt to James Joyce here than I realized.
A drunken drug induced mental breakdown that almost sent me over the edge too. I thought I enjoyed, On The Road, when I read it 15+ years ago, but know I wonder if the years have made me forgot what that book was really like too.
My first venture into Kerouac. Absolutely fascinating to watch the stages of his breakdown, yet he ends on such an optimistic note. (and then a poem that I was unable to comprehend).
I marked at least five sections where Kerouac's ability to perceive and articulate his circumstance and environment were unlike anything I had ever read. Pure brilliance and clarity, even in the midst of madness.
Makes me want to go back and read On The Road, but I definitely need to take a break from him for a bit.