Customer Reviews

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

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2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it.

That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader.

So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge).

Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century.

The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end.

A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.

I have had my copy of Naked Lunch for years and years, read through it many times, but have never attempted to write any kind of review on it, up untill now, because it is just such an amazing book that no words could ever do it any justice! Right from the beginning the writing is brilliant and creative and the pacing is absolutely furious.

There is no simple way to convey the 'story' because indeed nothing like a linear plot line exists. Many people, my own brother included, hate this and simply will not read the whole way through it for this reason alone. The only way to attempt to summerise the book as a whole in a tidy fasion is to say that essintialy it chronicles a mans journey from the United States, the heat was closing in, to Mexico and later Tangiers and finally to the imaginary Interzone.

Along the way we meet many colorful charaters, the most memorable of which is the charming and diabolical Dr Benway, and visit many exotic dreamscapes like the Meet Cafe where patrons eat the black meat of the giant aquatic centerpede while mugwamps dispense addictive fluid from their heads. At first glace the reader may assume that this dark world with its evil political factions and infernal beaurocracies is a paranoid nightmare of the author, but when you look closer it is the dark side of same world that we live in everyday rendered down to its most extreme and 'naked' form.

While many would like to put William S Burroughs down as nothing more than a junkie who killed his own wife and whose writing is very overated, there is simply such power in his words that cannot be denied. The captivating writing style and the amazingly hilairious black humor that abounds throught out the book (and is probually some of the darkest humor ever, in any medium) come straight off every page. Likewise many people, insecure people I would assume, look down on this book for it's sections that are some what pornographic, not that they that far from your average 'rommance' novel, but because they consist of homosexual activities. Obviuosly Burroughs's unblinking brutal disection of our darkest desires and addictions, whether it be drugs, sex, money or power over the mind of others was too much for the general public to handle when it was first published and it is a shame to see that even in this day and age there are still some who express those same small minded attitudes when they are confronted by the intensity of this writing.

The best way I can think to express my opinion of Naked Lunch is to say that I feel it lives up to it's strange title completely, indeed contained within is the most 'naked' view, the most powerfull, raw, twisted and decidedly dark take on reality ever told. And when you read this book it's is as though you have sat down to 'lunch', the book is such a feast for the mind, evey page full of energy, heavy idea's and thick with creative genius.

Not a book for everyone, but those open minded will find reading this book to be a genuinly enriching experience, indeed there is no other book quite like it, but squares should stay away.

What else can I say, other than that this is "the" book that has brought William S. Burroughs the most fame(infamy?) and glory. Most people interested in Beat Literature choose Kerouac for insight, but I feel that Burroughs gets to the root of the Beatniks' most defining element: Drug use/abuse. His style is unrelenting. His prose harsh and ragged, not unlike himslef for some 15 odd years of his life in which he lived as a junky. I urge the reader to not read this book in sequence from beginning to end as a traditional novel. Instead, read a chapter or two at a time. Then, set it down and leave it alone for a day. The next day, return and continue reading. Each pargraph; each page is a message unto itself. Burroughs uses a rehab center in a place called Interzone, the character William Lee, and a sadistic orgy to help convey the over-all idea that the junky is a sad and tragic individual. But, what makes the junky so tragic is not his position in life. It is the sad fact that he put himself there in the first place. And, to spite himself, the junky's body must continue this act even though his mind says no. It is sad that this book has not been given the credit that it is due. Only at the end of his life did Mr. Burroughs begin to reap the rewards of his, and his comrades' work. As though he couldn't stand another minute in the world of the straight and narrow without a friend(Allen Ginsberg, the last Beat), he died after a life of extreme hardships and bittersweet success. Needless to say, this book sums up Burroughs' early life on the streets before any real intimations of success. It is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those of you who prefer "popular" literature. It is for those of us who seek the truth, and read books about certain topics for an element of reality.

I'm not sure how to digest "Naked Lunch" let alone write a review about it. Burroughs' text is one of the most important to come out of the Beats, yet it's hard to read and didn't leave me with any sense of satisfaction. The novel is a true example of a novel driven purely by style and form and I think it hurst the overall vision of the text. I understand that the cut and splice and often tangential writing is meant to recreate a junk addicts perspective, yet at the end of the day, if nothing comes out of the text other than "some of the anecdotes were really something," it's hard to say how successful the novel is. Did I like it? At times. Did I enjoy reading it? Somewhat. I most certainly think it's a novel that has an important place in American History and within American Literature, but I don't think it stands up to "On the Road" and some of the other texts to come out of the Beat Generation.

It's been almost three years now since Uncle Bill scored the Immaculate Fix, but his spirit still lives on. This novel, Burroughs' greatest work was written in the late 1950's, a time when American pop culture reached untold heights of banality. Enter Naked Lunch - a double-barreled assault on truth, justice, and the American Way. No institution is safe, nothing is sacred, and the taboo is made holy, as capitalists, racists, fascists, homophobes, doctors, cops, Christians, and hypocrites of all sorts get their just desserts. Burroughs, a fortunate son born into wealth and power, dissects and destroys proper society in his prose, exploding mind bombs of words throughout. Veering somewhere between a bad acid trip and exact Swiftian satire, Naked Lunch remains the most original work of fiction ever written. A must-read for all serious students of literature, this is one of those books that you just can't "like" - you either love it, or you hate it. I absolutely loved it! This book also begs for re-reads as new insights are revealed with each reading. And please, PLEASE be sure to listen to Burroughs read the abridged version on tape! After completing this novel, Burroughs went on to invent the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction with his Nova Trilogy of novels. As Norman Mailer once opined, "Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may concievably be possessed by genius." Squares need not apply. A word to the Wise Guy.

This edition of the classic Burroughs text has has textual errors corrected by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime personal secretary James Grauerholz. In addition to presenting the text, this book includes a comprehensive essay on the process which brought Naked Lunch to publication (Kerouac and Ginsberg were heavily involved), as well as details on the editors' process of generated the restored text. The book concludes with additional fragments of writing by Burroughs which expand on some of the chapters of the novel.

The text is a narrative (in the absolute loosest sense of the term) about a narcotics addict who flees New York to travel through the Southern US, Mexico, South America, and into North Africa. It opens with clear paragraphs and a fairly typical storytelling structure and then disintegrates into stream of consciousness notes (of a drug addict) full of ellipsis points. The book moves from a literal world to a fantastic illusionary place of demons, people with mold growing on their bodies, transparent addicts, and rampant orgies of anal sex.

Is it an easy read? No. Is it a novel? Definitely not. It is, however, and important cultural read and an amazing book about being under the influence of drugs. If you don't get too far with the main text, before you toss the book away, be sure to check out the open letter from Burroughs to the medical community about addiction and treatment for a wide range of drugs (it appears at the end of both the original and restored editions). That essay is clearly written and very informative.

I bought Naked Lunch because of a friend of mine who was a Burroughs fan (I suppose you could say Burroughs junky). I had no idea what the book was about, and I knew nothing about the author. These probably weren't the most favorable conditions to be introduced to a book like Naked Lunch. In other words, I wasn't ready to read it.

I hated the first 20 pages of Naked Lunch. I wasn't yet used to the writing style... Burroughs uses a lot of obscure and unobvious slang, and a lot of similes and metaphors that don't seem to make sense. It's mostly sentence fragments. As I read, though, I kind of got used to the style. It didn't seem so frustrating any more; it was an enigma, and it was cool on top of that. The last half of the book is a lot more fun, anyway.

The bizzareness of Naked Lunch is probably what saved it for me, though. It's chock full of drugs and drug use. Most of the characters are gay, and some of them seem to be insane. There's an upper class eccentric who destroys social events and establishments, a man who used to be president of an island where the position of president is ridiculed, and a man who pumps his mental patients full of drugs. The book is sort of an allegory of Burrough's own life, and if you read about him you can see a lot of the parallels.

There's a lot of people I wouldn't recommend Naked Lunch to. In fact, I don't think I personally know anyone who I'd recommend it to. None of the people I know could stand it. They're all too sane. All the people out there who are obsessed with this book have got to be insane. Or just really smart, I guess. I'm dumb and sane. I still happened to like it, though.

As an avid Stephen King and splatter-movie fan, I can still say that Naked Lunch is the most genuinely disturbing book I have ever read. Written under the influence of what was apparently a really bad heroin fix, Naked Lunch is the stuff of nightmares. I can't stress this point enough: Burroughs doesn't just cross boundaries of good taste, he utterly destroys them with sadistic glee. No stone is left unturned, no taboo left unbroken.
That said, this is a pretty enjoyable read. The lack of a coherent story line may annoy some people, but it also shows how sporadically the author's hallucinations appear and disappear. The only main character seems to be heroin. This is the literary equivalent of the film Eraserhead; dark, morbid, sickening, and about as close to a nightmare as the conscious mind can get. And like Eraserhead, it's impossible to fully interpret or ignore once it's in view.

As other reviewers have complained, this book is lacking a plot and doesn't have much of a structure. A reader looking for a a more clear and simplistic Burroughs should try out his pulpish but entertaining _Junkie_ and _Queer_. These books use an autobiographical format to show the author falling into a life of drugs and homosexual dependence, which the author clearly viewed as entrapping and morally wrong, even as he fell into them and maintained a objective viewpoint.

Naked Lunch takes these themes and greatly improves them. After starting with a scene of the protaganist fleeing the law, it's broken into vaguely related scenes of several pages each. These scenes are often bizarre or disgusting, but are always intriguing. Taken together, they give an impressionistic look into the life of an addict. They are often extremely funny, and the writing is very impressive. I enjoy pulp fiction, and Burrough's take at pulp fiction at the end, with Hauser & O'Brien, is perhaps the strongest piece of hard-boiled detective writing I've ever read.

Drugs are central to Burrough's vision, but this isn't really a drug book, either, and is more about Burrough's compelling if slightly twisted philosophies. Heroin is used as a central metaphor for systems of control that Burroughs sees elsewhere - in domineering characters, in 50's politics, in modern science, in patriarchies. If the reader can get past the initial shock of the book, it's extremely readable and I'd recommend it highly

This book is what you get when you cross a Harvard education with a heroin habit.

It is incorrect to describe it as a "novel"; instead it is a collection of short vignettes bound together by recurrent characters, themes, and motifs. Many reviewers who have given it one star complain about its obvious lack of plot, but such is your life on The Junk: you drift day to day, fix to fix, with no real direction.

Naked Lunch is a powerful anti-drug novel, but more-so it is about ALL addictions. Sex, food, greed; any all-consuming passion is worked in and exposed with vivid horror. There is a lot of subtle social commentary lurking beneath the surreal imagery, though it often takes several readings to find it.

Many people view this book as pointless and grotesque, while others (such as myself) see it as a sly, sardonic comedy. If you think the movie "Clockwork Orange" is *funny* then you will LOVE this book.