Tristessa
Ratings4
Average rating3
Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico City, this is the story of a man's ill-fated relationship with a woman he portrays with tenderness and dignity, even as her life spirals out of control "Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntatic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight. "This entire short novel Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuaha dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, & pads at dawn in Mexico City slums." —Allen Ginsberg
Series
Featured Series
32 released booksDuluoz Legend
Duluoz Legend is a 32-book series first released in 1950 with contributions by Jack Kerouac, Джак Керуак, and Джек Керуак.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Tristessa - the way it rolls down your tongue like a hiss, escaping like a slow death, is reminiscent of Kerouac's muse from Mexico. A long-time junky, dead eyes, dead love, dancing her way to ruins, untouchable.
One takes from this book the difficult but obvious truth, lessons greater than unrequited love. To fall in love with a junky is to step into a black hole. To live with a junky, one must become a junky. So all throughout this thing we have Jack tiptoeing around and against the void with his bottle of alcohol and notebook of poems, taking us through dizzying streets of men and women in rags, dead animals in ditches, morphine shooters in dark alleys and beloved Tristessa - sick without a shot, sick with goofballs...
It's a sad, painful, brilliant novella. A good entry to Kerouac's works, if one may ask. He is a true jazz writer, making good use of odd notes in language and still have it come out as music. Not many can achieve that. He is to be read in rhythm. In this book, Kerouac writes an ode to lost things, in the process of losing one. La tristesse durera.
