Customer Reviews

The Dharma Bums

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3 star:		(9)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

"On the Road" may be considered the classic Kerouac novel, the archetype of Beatnik prose, but I would recommend "Dharma Bums" over "On the Road," as the best Kerouac read and the most important of Kerouac's works. I would even recommend "Dharma Bums" over the Kerouac Reader or other beat anthologies.

I'm always the first to admit that my perceptions of books are colored by the context of my life when I read it. I first read "Dharma Bums" when I was in college in Boulder, Colorado, I was an apathetic academic but had a budding interest in Buddhism and was sitting in for sunrise meditation with a Zen group at a Buddhist temple. I didn't own a car, rode my bike everywhere, hiked, rock climbed, and indulged in other beat-like habits. Still, I think I started all of Kerouac's books somewhere along the line, some multiple times, and "Dharma Bums" was the only one I finished.

Having just now reread it, it continues to stand apart from his other works. Kerouac's writing is always interesting to me but it is hard to move forward sometimes without a story arch. When reading Big Sur, for example, in which he writes as elegantly as possible about descending into the madness of alcohol psychosis, I find it hard to maintain my momentum.

"Dharma Bums" represents a time, a naive time in retrospect perhaps, but a fun exciting time when the beats were young, full of energy and enthusiasm, and really believed they were on to something cosmic. Over the course of this book we see Kerouac's Buddhism deepen. In fact, more than deepen, it matured and softened, evolving from austere and ascetic into something much more philosophical. More Zen, less dogmatic, not necessarily in conflict with indulgence and gratification. And things are happening in the book, there are elements of plot in the narrators travels and adventures. They climb a mountain as a spiritual practice, and, after struggling with paralyzing fear, Kerouac learns the great lesson "you can't fall off a mountain." There is the suicide of Rosie, a manic psychotic he was entrusted to baby-sit. There is various other traveling, hitchhiking, and meditating adventures, and the book wraps up with enchanting nature prose, written during solitary days as a wilderness fire lookout.

I had to check this out of the library to reread it, (see my listmania, "Books I wish weren't packed away at my in-laws"). My interest in Zen was sparked by this book initially and re-reading it drove me right back to the mat.

Man, I don't know where to start. "The Dharma Bums" is a masterpiece of the Beat Generation and a novel I will not soon forget. After The Loser's Club by Richard Perez, this is the best book I've read all year.

Jack Kerouac wrote this story about his days as a Zen Buddhist and rucksack wanderer. His alias in the book is Raymond Smith, and he is living in Berkley with his good buddy Alvah Goldbook(Allen Ginsburg). Ray meets a Zen Lunatic named Japhy Ryder(Gary Snyder), and together they travel the mountains and pastures of Central California trying to find themselves and find the true meaning of life. Ray also journies to Desolation Peak in Washington and lives there alone for the summer, which is just another chapter to this amazing piece of literature.

Another part of this book that impressed me was the beginning, when Kerouac wrote about his experience at the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and spoke of Alvah Goldbook's first reading of his poem "Wail", which in reality was Allen Ginsburg's legendary first reading of "Howl", which to this day is a Beat Literature classic.

While reading this book, I was constantly marking lines and passages, because some of the descriptions and poetry Kerouac included in this novel are simply amazing. "The Dharma Bums" is one of those books I will treasure forever and read over and over again.

Having heard me praise this book countless times, my wife finally read it for herself. Her response? "You know, I was expecting some stereotype of `cool' Beatniks, trying to be so hip and detached. But that's just some popular media image. The people in this book are exuberant, thoughtful, even spiritual!" That sums it up as well as anything. Forget the glib idea of alterna-cultural one-upmanship that passes for a Beat attitude these days - "The Dharma Bums" is about naïve exuberance, anything-but-ironic soul-searching, an eager exploration of life's sorrows and joys, and the sheer, exhilarating, wondrous zest of being alive and aware in an endlessly fresh world. If reading this clear mountain stream of a book doesn't make you want to change your life and your way of looking at life, then you're just hopelessly blind to something precious! Life is so much more than the neatly packaged, pre-imagined commercial that society would love to sell you, and "The Dharma Bums" will gladly show you one possible way of finding your true path.

DHARMA BUMS came out a year after ON THE ROAD. While the latter is the beat manifesto celebrating the peripatetic lifestyle, BUMS focuses on the beat romance with Buddhist enlightenment and the building of an inner life. ON THE ROAD was an instant, memorable success, and while BUMS no doubt fed a desire for more of the same, it stands apart, its own satisfying work of art, its own way of sending telegraphs from the heart of the beat movement. Many of the episodes are based on actual events and experiences that were still fresh memories as the book was written.

Ray Smith is the first person narrator of DHARMA BUMS, a look alike for Jack Kerouac. For most of the book, he slyly puts Japhy Ryder at the center of attention. Ryder is a stand-in for poet Gary Snyder who survives, who as a young man in his twenties was already a natural leader. Surrounding them are other familiar figures from the era, including Alvah Goldbook (translates to Allen Ginsberg). They all write poetry and love jazz, women, and a casual lifestyle. They seek spiritual enlightenment. They delight in trolling for clothes in the Good Will and Army and Navy stores, they savor the simplest meal over a campfire. They are the Dharma Bums, rejecting the paralyzed emptiness they ascribe to middle class life.

I really like this book. The prose is clear and concrete, even when sorting through abstract notions. It is often funny. Kerouac had extraordinary insight into individual nuances and desires, and plays them into the tension of the journey and the sorting out. He had a gift for seeing how outsiders might perceive him and his crowd and how history might come to interpret the present he was portraying. Though he is legendarily perceived as a spontaneous artist, there is extraordinary control and shape imposed on these pages. Only twice does he momentarily break his world: once, in my edition, he slips and refers to Japhy as Gary, and another time, slipping out of the immediacy of the action, he pays a compliment to a simple meal on the road, noting that even as a lionized young writer in New York, he had not had a better meal in an upscale restaurant. Those curious nanoseconds can be forgiven, however. This book is a joy.

I cannot write enough words to describe how wonderful this book is. I could write a book about its greatness, its mind-numbing beauty, its special place in the pantheon of great human achievements. Jack Kerouac was a shooting star, a dharma bum in the truest sense of the word. This man has a style and fluidity to his writing that is otherworldly, and yet so magically human. He synthesizes poetry and prose in a way that not many have ever approached. His writing is lyrics to his life, my life, your life. He can express the human condition better than anyone I have ever encountered. In the Dharma Bums, he tells about his adventures with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder), a man who lived his life the way that Kerouac wrote. Spontaneous, beautiful and pure. This is a book with power, that has changed many peoples lives, including mine, and has the power to influence so many more. Buy five copies of this book and loan them out to your friends and strangers. Kerouac's dream of a rucksack revolution is one of the most beautiful ideas that I have ever known, and this book is the starting point for that inevitable revolution. So get this book and get started. Hit the road and things will never be the same. peace.

'The Dharma Bums' is a tale of social dropouts in California who search for Buddhist enlightenment and truth (dharma) amid wine, sex, hitchhiking and mountain scenery. It's a good introduction to Kerouac - shorter, lighter and more accessible than On the Road, which is a more epic but also has some monotonous bits.

If religious certainties turn you off, you might tire of dharma-bum narrator Ray's Buddhist slogans and the dogmatic Zen views of Japhy, Ray's buddy. But though Kerouac portrays Buddhism as liberating, he also laughs a lot at kooky piety. At some points - like Ray's 'banana sermon' - religion becomes either profound or hilarious, or both.

Ray tries to reach nirvana by convincing himself the world's an illusion, which makes it ironic that the best bits in this novel are poetic descriptions of mountains and travel. The final lonely mountain-top vigil - based on Kerouac's experience as a fire lookout, described in Lonesome Traveller - is a tour de force. Kerouac's prose flair allows him to string 10 adjectives in front of a noun, a heinous crime in modern writing fashion, and get away with it.

Kerouac balances Ray and Japhy's Buddhist belief that the world is illusory against the earthbound views of world-weary poet Alvah Goldbook, a thinly veiled Allen Ginsberg. Alvah's quest to soak up his surroundings rather than transcend them puts him closer to the philosophy of On the Road, in which the travelling bums reach a jubilant but sad-hearted state of raw appreciation of their phsyical world.

Through the Ray-Japhy-Alvah triangle and all the minor characters, 'The Dharma Bums' gives various answers to Kerouac's big question in this and other books: how to lead a free existence in a conformist careerist consumerist society. Fifty years later, the question's got more vital. Youthful rebellion and boheme are just marketing motifs for soft drinks, CDs and snowboards now, but Kerouac shows you it's possible to be authentically free - if you have the guts.

Westerners tend to have under-adjusted encounters with Buddhism, because they are usually attached to the `idea' of their being detached-- a fallacy because Buddhism asserts the `end of self' altogether. Thus, it is difficult to write about Buddhism in a western context, especially in a first person narrative, which is what Kerouac rather successfully has done. Kerouac is self-aware of this dynamic and creates two characters (Ray and Japhy) who start off traveling together, but become more adverse as their philosophies clash. Japhy becomes deeply attached, almost smug, to his spiritual evolution, while the more modest Ray continues the search for self, without the stringent belief system of his former companion. Readers may find it a tad convenient that Kerouac appropriate himself as the closer to truth Ray. Whatever the case, the polarity is an affective device.

Similar to On The Road, Kerouac writes with ease and eloquence, and at times, profound insights. Some of the more predictable scenes in the book feature hippy parties, road trips, and drug use, for which the author is famous. However, the book is just as full of sweet, quirky, and new ideas on Zen Buddhism that are slipped in between the sentences, along with a dozen or so lovely haikus. The crucial redeeming quality with this book is that Ray doesn't become too heady or obsessed with his philosophical inclinations. He simply goes about his way, making light comments about things without becoming the author's mouthpiece, an unfortunate aspect of many books.

From Oregon, California, Ohio, and the Carolinas (to name a few), Ray ends up home with his family, a failure in the context of the bohemian life he strived for. It is at this unlikely place he undergoes an experience that perhaps is as close and earnest as one can ever get to a selfless experience.

Kerourac manages to write a book about truth and God without being pedantic or self-righteous. Ray is humble and friendly, so readers are not intimidated, rather, they are that much more eager to join the quest. This is a warm, hope filled, and youthful novel written by an author who embodies the search in all of us.

this book is one of my favorite kerouac novels. with each new reading i find something more insightful than the time before.the book has a mixture of catholic and zen buddhist terms and ideas all expounded by a hobo boddhisattva named ray smith. smith finds friendship with a find assortment of zen lunatics most notably the protaganist japhy ryder, who becomes a buddhist icon of sorts to smith. the first reading of the book one is impressed with the holy wander smith . but with subsequent readings i found that kerouac really intended to make smith more of a buddhist bumbler and those he encountered actually his wise teachers. percieving the novel in this light makes one appreciate kerouac's genius as a novelist. but to really appreciate what kerouac speaks of in the novel one should also read kerouac's desolation angels and some of the dharma. these two books will further enlighten the reader on the power of kerouac the spiritual writer.

Man, I don't know where to start. "The Dharma Bums" is a masterpiece of the Beat Generation and a novel I will not soon forget. After The Loser's Club by Richard Perez, this is the best book I've read all year.

Jack Kerouac wrote this story about his days as a Zen Buddhist and rucksack wanderer. His alias in the book is Raymond Smith, and he is living in Berkley with his good buddy Alvah Goldbook(Allen Ginsburg). Ray meets a Zen Lunatic named Japhy Ryder(Gary Snyder), and together they travel the mountains and pastures of Central California trying to find themselves and find the true meaning of life. Ray also journies to Desolation Peak in Washington and lives there alone for the summer, which is just another chapter to this amazing piece of literature.

Another part of this book that impressed me was the beginning, when Kerouac wrote about his experience at the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and spoke of Alvah Goldbook's first reading of his poem "Wail", which in reality was Allen Ginsburg's legendary first reading of "Howl", which to this day is a Beat Literature classic.

While reading this book, I was constantly marking lines and passages, because some of the descriptions and poetry Kerouac included in this novel are simply amazing. "The Dharma Bums" is one of those books I will treasure forever and read over and over again.

If you found "On The Road" left you desperate for more of Kerouac's energetic prose, then this is perhaps the best next step. It is a lot more reflective, and this, combined with Kerouac's trademarked humble narrator allows real engagment with a book that deals with something worth writing about. It deals with mountain climbing, outdoor parties, groovy beat people and all the other unattainable, idealistic Kerouac things, but this is laced with fragments of Bhuddism, in the attitudes of the characters, their reflection in the freedom of the mountain experience, and the general escapism that provides so much of Bhuddism's popular appeal - it a sort of diet "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance". It's really good - I'm sure you'll enjoy it. It's also less "experimental" in literary terms, meaning here Kerouac is simply conveying a story without trying to re-invent the wheel. In many ways, this is a good introduction to Kerouac. The language is simple; it's also technically a much simpler novel than say "The Subterraneans" or "Dr. Sax," even "On the Road." Kerouac is not pushing the envelope of invention, here. But with all that I must say it's a wonderful book; it's also (dare I say) Kerouac's most "innocent" and sweetest book. There's a disarming earnestness and youthfulness at play in "Dharma Bums," which reminds of a recent Amazon pick I enjoyed "The Losers Club" by Richard Perez. In any event, don't miss this great book!