Customer Reviews

Bohemia

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Reading a passage of this book is like sitting down to coffee with a wry, friendly time-traveler who has seen everything and is excited to espouse the good parts. Gold's style of prose is jaunty and deliberate- there are sentences that glow with creative genious. It seems that Gold has found the perfect balance between historical descriptive narrative and philosophical meandering. He never strays too far from his story. In the middle, there is a devastating passage where he takes his girlfriend up to William S. Burrough's hotel room. There are other writers up there and it is a hilarious scene. I won't ruin it for you.
The best aspect of this book is the intimacy Gold has with the great writers. He has hung out with James Baldwin and Burroughs and Miller and Ginsberg. He also describes scenes with Anais Nin(not that she is one of the greats) and Henry Rollins (but he keep referring to him as Henry ROBBINS when it is obvious he's talking about Rollins, I don't get it) and thereby invites you into this fascinating world of artists and anarchists that entices and beguiles. I was both enticed and beguiled. There are so many great quotes in this book you'd better have a pencil and notebook handy- there is stuff a writer can really learn from- by Saroyan, Ferlinghetti, Dylan Thomas, painters, musicians, beautiful bohemian women. The point of narration moves from San Fransisco to Jerusalem, from Paris to South Florida, from the east village in New York to the furthest reaches of nowhere. I discovered that BOHEMIA is not the amorphous idea I thought it was- but a vast physical entity which has no boundaries at all but lives on forever in ever-changing pockets of earth. This book is quite the thrilling ride.