Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [Paperback]

Richard Farina (Author), Thomas Pynchon (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics | Publication Date: March 29, 2005

In this title, Farina evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering - among other things - mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is the ultimate novel of college life during the first hallucinatory flowering of what has famously come to be known as The Sixties. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me follows haunted ur-hippy Gnossos Pappadopoulis upon return to his old university town that's just tilting into a new era, and Gnossos' involvement in a swirl of sixties-style drug taking and the search for love and the meaning of it all. It is a hilarious and haunting book.

About the Author

Richard Farina was killed in a motorcycle accident in Carmel, California, on April 30, 1966-two days after the publication of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. A posthumous collection of his writings, Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone, was published in 1969. Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937. He is the author of The Crying of Lot 49, V., Vineland, Slow Learner, and Mason & Dixon.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (March 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140189300
• ISBN-13: 978-0140189308
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars We Don't Like It When Someone Breaks the Rules, December 30, 2006

By 

Guthrie McIllhennon - See all my reviews

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

I was compelled to read this book. I had just read David Hajdu's wonderful biographical book, *Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina*, a book that I highly recommend to readers generally interested in Dylan and Baez and the cultural phenomenon of the 60s zeitgeist, or to readers wanting to know more about the U.S.'s fascination with folk music during the late 50s and early 60s.

I'll get to Farina's book in a second, but first I want to say something about Richard Farina. Hajdu's seductive account of Farina--his manic ambitions, peripatetic wanderings, multiple artistic talents, brilliant conversations, spontaneous insights, Lothario lifestyle, and con-artist bravado--compelled me to read Farina's one and only book just to see what he produced as a writer. Similarly, I was compelled to find Farina's two recordings for Vanguard Records (he made two very hip folk records with his wife Mimi Baez).

Farina was a character. He used others callously to gain opportunities for himself. In that respect, he was a lot like Dylan, and other successful artists, letting his self-centered ambitions guide his actions, regardless of how they affected others. Using others as stepping stones, he furthered his career, first as a writer and then as a singer/songwriter and musician, and then again as a writer. Having learned from Hajdu's book about Farina's talent for self-advancement, I was not surprised while reading Farina's novel to see he is uninterested in following established conventions of novel writing for his time. He had his own style. His writing has been called self-absorbed or solipsistic, and those criticisms are true. An example of Farina's self-absorbtion is that he is hardly interested in providing readers with the usual or conventional cues to orient the reader to the setting, plot, and point of view (the point of view exasperatingly alternates from first person to third person at the whim of the author); moreover, he provides no clear hierarchy of characters (e.g. major and minor characters).

Indeed, there is only one major character in *Been Down...* and he is Gnossos, whose life is oddly similar to Farina's: travling out West, to Cuba, Ireland, New York, and in the South; racking up numerous sexual conquests, experimenting with esoteric drugs and living the high life; manically seeking new experiences; in short, doing everything that supposedly defined coming of age in the U.S. during the sixties.

Readers rightly complain that the book is self-indulgent. Self-indulgence and narcissism were obvious guideposts in Farina's own life: he was ambitious and did not follow the rules. It fascinates me that his self-indulgence is manifested in his writing, which is experimental, self-pleasing, self-affirming, and self-interested.

Another reason this book, written between 1959 and 1965, is worth reading is that it presaged the coming Gonzo style of writing, later practiced to great effect by Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and a few others. The sixties bent the rules for what was allowable, indeed possible, in popular and artful writing, and Farina was riding that experimental wave long before others who eventually got the credit for "inventing" Gonzo style. If Farina hadn't died suddenly and at such a young age, he would probably be esteemed among the writers I mention above, as well as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, and a host of journalists like Lester Bangs and P. J. O'Rourke, all of whom experimented with Gonzo style or New Journalism, an offshoot of the Gonzo style of writing.

So, it seems to me, the value in reading this book is to understand how literary tides were changing in the Sixties. This book is a prime illustration of how those turbulent waters and winds of change altered the shores of contemporary literature. Although Gonzo "literature" never really amounted to a viable "school" of writing, elements of it are now evident in mainstream writing; for example, the birth of creative non-fiction as a genre of writing owes something to Gonzo "literature." Moreover, the Gonzo style opened the door for much more personal experimentation in writing, and Farina, as I said, was at the forefront. Farina may not have been interested in leading the Gonzo fight as Thompson did a couple years later ("Gonzo" was not even a word at the time of Farina's death), but he had tapped into a new experimental style of expression, and I like to speculate that he would have become every bit the artist and changeling that Dylan has become. Hajdu's biography of Farina et al. tacitly concludes that Farina in 1966, at 28 years of age, was already a remarkable, multi-talented, and accomplished artist whose potential was cut short by accidental death, just as he was coming into his own.

In my opinion, there is one other characteristic of Farina's first and only novel that makes it a worthy read: it has a remarkable similarity to Thomas Pynchon's first novel, *V*. Everything that I've said above about Farina's book equally describes Pynchon's first novel, too. Both writers were buddies at Cornell and read each other's stories as undergraduates. They were both autodidacts and injected their first novels with passing bits of arcana from countless esoteric subjects, from nuclear fission to Rennaisance art. Curiously, one song on Farina's first album of folk music, *Celebrations for a Grey Day*, is titled "V" and is a tribute to Pynchon's novel. I think it's fair to say that, even though Pynchon's novel was published in 1963 before Farina's novel, the writers were equally influenced by one another at that early stage in their careers.

So, I have given a number of good reasons to read Farina's book. But aside from these reasons, the question remains: Is Farina's novel a monumental work? Reading the rest of the reviews here in Amazon, I have to conclude Farina's novel annoys as many readers as it pleases. *Been Down...* probably will never be considered a great American novel, maybe not even a minor classic, but its sales will remain steady as long as readers are interested in socio-cultural history of the U.S. during the sixties; and the literature and music of that period will be appreciated for what it tells us about those times and its people. While it is true that Farina's book deviates significantly from conventional standards of good literature, that deviation is exactly why it is worth reading: it is an exemplary novel of artistic experimentation at a critical period of change in U.S. culture.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth it, December 2, 1999

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

Okay, so it's got an introduction by Thomas Pynchon and it brings back a lot of memories for people-who-were-young-during-the-Sixties, but what about those of us who were "unlucky" enough to be born after that halcyon decade crashed and burned? Is the book really any good? Yes. Farina was, for my money, one of the best writers of his generation, even though one novel and an out-of-print (but, if you can find it, surprisingly good) collection of short pieces isn't much to go on. Although the book is actually set around the turn of the decade, 59-61 or so, there's an eerie impression that it was written twenty years later. For all the drink, drugs and college high-jinks, Death, War and that other lost horseman of the apocalypse, Responsibility, are never far away. The main character, Gnossos Pappadopolis, is a rucksack-wearin' hipster who attempts to maintain his Cool in an atmosphere of student demos and faculty corruption. Farina makes no attempt to sanctify Gnossos, and nor would we want him to, yet we end up sympathising with him. Pynchon's famous jacket quote says that the book comes like "the Hallelujah Chorus being played by 200 kazzo players with perfect pitch" - make that Barber's Adagio being played by a jug band and you're about right.

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Farina's Timeless Classic: A Reflection in a Crystal Dream, May 25, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

Richard Farina was a consummate songerwriter, poet and hopeful novelist, until his first and only novel burst onto the scene. Although a later book was released that was a compilation of some short stories, poems, and articles about him, this was the only book he had to stretch toward the literary heavens with. And it was indeed a smash!

Unfortunately, Farina, who was married to Joan Baez' younger sister Mimi, with whom he had forged a folk duo that played and recorded some of his wonderful poetry put to music, never lived to experience his own wild success, as he fell off the back of a motorcycle on the way home from the publication party for this book, and was killed instantly. But the book lives, indeed it flourishes, and the paperback version has never been out of print in all this time, which is ample testimony to its continuing power, verve, and its timeless message, as well as to its beautifully written story.

This is a wonderful book, one that has grown in reputation and stature over the intervening decades, and as another, much younger reviewer commented, it is one for everyone, not just for us greying babyboomers who were lucky enough to have discovered and experienced Richard in his prime. For all of us who have read his work, or listened to his music, or experienced his poetry, or for those of us who were lucky enough to see Mimi and Richard perform at the Newport Folk Festival, one can still hear the faint echoes of their haunting guitar harmonies and vocals, and we truly know that he is still with us. We know that he has truly left us a present, his evocative "reflections in a crystal dream".

Although set in a time before the changes of the sixties started to roar, one soon recognizes teh signs and spirit of the times in his words and the storyline. Enter Gnossos, soul of the road, keeper of the eternal flame, and a pilgrim on an endless search for the holy grail of cool, and the college town of Athene (read Ithaca, NY, home of Cornell) will never be the same. Nor will you after digesting this wild, extremely readable parable. So, friend, don't hesitate; buy it, read it, but do so slllllloooooowwwwwllllly, savoring every gorgeous moment of it. It's all we have left of him, the only legacy of an incredible talent and a wonderful spokesperson for the otherwise indescribable sixties.