Customer Reviews

Her

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

it worries me that no one has written a review for this book yet. they say i'll be the first. i'm ordering this book through amazon, but i read it my first time many moons ago, back when i was reading "watt" by beckett, and a lot of other wierd stuff. maybe it was just a point in my life, but this book spoke to me. wacked out on whatever those crazy beats got whacked out on, consumed by passion and equally consumed by confusion, ranting and pouring it all out on the page, this book is what comes out when you have nothing else to lose. read it. don't try and make sense of it. there is no sense when you are crushed by longing. this is a monument to that feeling you get when being in love makes you a deranged idiot.

A beautiful surrealist novel, this is the sort of thing that's so easy to do badly, and so difficult to do well. It doesn't have a plot so much as an underlying archetypal theme, that of Man pursuing the ideal & unattainable Feminine in all of Her ever-changing aspects; but it does have an ongoing narrative drive, one which unfolds in fluid prose, rich in imagery & emotional intensity. Ferlinghetti perfectly recreates the essence of a dream, which has its own logic & its own needs, and makes its own sort of deep sense. The reader has only to surrender to its flow & be carried along, with one image or scene yielding to another in a continuous surge of immediate experience & psychological surprise. Highly recommended!

When I looked at the cover of this book, I couldn't even begin to fathom what was inside of it. The story itself is so surreal that it wouldn't even be considered a story by some. The plot (if there is one) is so vauge that I couldn't identify it. And that's what makes ot good! I must read more Ferlenghetti. I have tried my hand at writing such a book, but with no sucess. The text is fresh, not at all dull. Don't try reading this while you're in your right mind, though, and not during the day, either. The scenes that the author creates are sort of harrowing, they linger in your mind, and they stick. Read it in small sections. It took me weeks, but it was worth it.
It is difficult to get used to Ferlenghetti's writing style, but once you're into it, it doesn't let go. It's all sort of like a dream, some parts a nightmare. The ending was hard to understand from my perspective, but it seems to sum everything up. I highly reccomend this book.

I picked this up because a reviewer compared this to Barnes "Nightwood," one of the greatest books ever. I would compare it to some of Bob Dylan's sixties liner notes. I think maybe he was trying to follow Kerouac where he wrote "On the Road" straight through using the "first thought is the best thought." But this effort just shows how unique Kerouac was. This is embarassing gibberish.

totally agree with the first reviewer, many more people should be reading this book, expressing as it does a complete subjection to the writer's art and babbling about blowing up to fill a room. like breton perhaps ferlinghetti forgets about popular literary constraints and merely expresses himself in perfect sequences. remember philip quarles in Huxley's point counter point, he says that a good story could come out of one person's seemingly unmemorable journey from the bus stop next to his house and his front room. Ferlinghetti, like so many kids, spends these pages searching for the essence of the female,essentially. yes, read this book when drunk or tired, or both. or neither.