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

Richard Fariña , Thomas Pynchon
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)

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Book Description

May 1, 1996 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics
Fariña 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. A portrait of an explosive decade, sparkling with inventive writing and conveying the essence of a generation, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, as Thomas Pynchon writes in the introduction, "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch."

"A marvelous storyteller, Fariña is fit to join the company of Kerouac, Kesey, and Pynchon." —San Francisco Chronicle


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Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) + The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
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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

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics (May 1, 1996)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140189300
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140189308
  • Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #68,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
53 of 54 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
Format: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.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Worth it December 2, 1999
Format: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.
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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format: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. Read more ›

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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Been Around So Long It's A Part Of Me July 19, 2001
Format:Paperback
I read this book in one sitting the day that it hit the bookstores. Being a fan of Farina's music, I had anxiously awaited its publication, The first edition, which I have read over a half dozen times (about once a decade after three readings in it's year of pubication,) sits on my bookshelf next to his posthumously published Long Time Coming And A Long Time Gone. They are a part of the cornerstone of my Modern American Fiction collection. Since I still have my first edition, I have never read the Pynchon introduction. Farina must have known something as the book's opening quotation from Benjamin Franklin is " I must soon quit the scene." Farina died on the day of the autographing party for this book. Bottom line, it is a wonderful read. It is a portrait of the time, yet transends that time in many ways. If you do not find wonder in this book, there is something that you just do not get. I still mourn his death and all the music and prose that he did not write. So many talented people leave us too soon.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars If you missed the sixties......
...this book will give you an idea of what was going on in the heads of young people at the time. Sometimes funny, sometimes oblique. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Tahoe Rob
5.0 out of 5 stars Down So Long
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) I used to own this book when I was just a young sprite (1968) but as often happens,I loaned it to... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Big Tony
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic
This is one of the best books of it's genre, along side On the Road, Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test. One guy's pre-early 1960's college student/hard core party-man, Greek to the... Read more
Published 21 months ago by S. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic
It is, in its way, a classic story that transfers very nicely to anyone who is in the academy, or knows someone who is headed there. The comic absurdity is timeless. Read more
Published on April 23, 2010 by Benjamin Monroe
5.0 out of 5 stars Revisiting an old friend
I first read this book when it was newly published and I was young. To follow Richard's thoughts again after 40+ years brought back much; memories, hopes, joys and fears. Read more
Published on March 13, 2010 by Dr.Tramp
5.0 out of 5 stars You Had to Want to be There
I agree with many of the foregoing reviews. So many things are experienced by us at just the right time in our lives. Read more
Published on January 3, 2010 by Mark Levy
3.0 out of 5 stars It Had It's Time
This book, in conjunction with many others, was important to me as my mind underwent some desperately needed expansion in the sixties. As a social tool it had real value. Read more
Published on July 6, 2009 by Ralph Potter
3.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgia isn't what it used to be
For maximum enjoyment of this book, I suggest that you read it in 1968 when you are 17 years old. You will think it's hip, relevant and revelatory. Read more
Published on October 27, 2008 by Sheldon Leemon
5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic
It's hard to knock this surrealistic journey from the mind of a truly original talent. At turns hilarious and horrifying, the sensibility behind the story shines through at every... Read more
Published on June 2, 2008 by LT Shivers
3.0 out of 5 stars The Beat Sound without the Beat Soul
This is a tough book to critique - it's championed by Thomas Pynchon and other people from that era as a book as important to the Beat Generation as "On the Road" and work by... Read more
Published on February 19, 2008 by C. Mendoza-tolentino
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