The Soft Machine [Mass Market Paperback]

William S. Burroughs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1973

Book one in Burroughs' surreal, anarchic 'Cut-Up Trilogy'. Hanged soldiers, North African street urchins, addicted narcotics agents, Spanish rent boys, evil doctors, corrupt judges and monsters from the mythology of history or the laboratories of science -- Burroughs is truly the Hieronymous Bosch of our time. In this surreal, savage and brilliantly funny novel, Burroughs' famous 'cut-up' technique, the slicing and random folding in of words, was fully developed, transforming the narrative into an extraordinary, unequalled new form of prose poetry.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'"The Soft Machine" has its background in the underwater cities of Flash Gordon serials, broken-down towns in South America, faded photos and 1920s films in seedy movie houses. Essential reading.' Observer '[Burroughs'] great fictions [show] his superb, hard-edged satirical visions of cancerous and addictive consumerism; his elegiac and poetic invocations of sadness and dislocation; his enormous fertility of ideas and imagery.' Will Self, Guardian 'What Burroughs has tried to do, here as in other books, is to blend the reality of an addict's experience with his fantasies, and to create from this mixture a world compounded of myth and science fiction in which freedom and order are eternally opposed. Out of the dirt, the excrement, the couplings, Burroughs makes a disgusting, exciting poetry.' Sunday Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

William Burroughs was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, 'Naked Lunch'. William Burroughs died in 1997. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 12, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345236041
• ISBN-13: 978-0345236043
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,423,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bizarre, but fun, experience for the very open mind, June 13, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Soft Machine (Paperback)

I've given this book a high acclaim, but to be honest it's difficult to come up with a rating. Easily 99.9% of the population will not be able to deal with this book, both for moral and comprehendable reasons. If you have read and enjoyed other Burrough's novels, you'll get a kick out of this one: lots of Nova Mob intrigue, some truly funny industry parodies, and lots of familiar faces (Kiki, et al). But if you've found Burroughs difficult, or if you're easily offended by graphic homosexual goings-on, you should steer far away from this one. My personal rating is not so much against other literature, but against other Burroughs. Stacked next to them, I feel this is a good one. Very fast paced, and usually on target. But pick it up only if you really dare

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Addiction: an agent of control, August 1, 2007

By 

T. F. Johnson (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Soft Machine (Paperback)

The Soft Machine is Burroughs's definitive work of cut-up and experimental writing. Most of the elements of the book are taken from the same period of writing that produced his first success Naked Lunch and are in many ways a natural continuation of that work. Many familiar characters pop up in The Soft Machine and many of the same themes of homosexuality, drug addiction, death, murder and corruption appear throughout. That being said, The Soft Machine is in many ways different from Naked Lunch. The most apparent is the total abandonment of any semblance to a coherent storyline. I will call this the cut-up style in the macro approach. There is a micro side of it as well. In almost every sentence Burroughs applies the technique to combine words and phrases that at first glance have no apparent connection or meaning together. The result is an interesting, if a bit tiring form of literary art.

I started reading this book directly after I finished Naked Lunch and was a bit let down by it at first. I was looking for something that had a bit more meaning taken as a whole and The Soft Machine just isn't that kind of book. It was only after I realized this that I began to appreciate it for what it was: a conscious attempt to create a new literary form and actively use words to illustrate the patterns of society and life that we are too familiar and dependent upon. Addiction is a dominant theme in Burroughs's work and it normally manifests itself in the form of dope, but I think he uses his unique style to illuminate the other pervasive forms of addiction that he saw saturating society. Addiction is essentially concerned with control, the control of a substance over the actions and choices of an individual. For Burroughs a mode of though or way of life could be just as easily substituted for a substance as long as it met the conditions of addiction.

The Soft Machine is an essential work and in many ways definitive in Burroughs assault against all the agents of control in our societies. Through a destruction of past literary forms and the resulting reconstruction into something utterly different he hoped to show not a solution to the problems confronting us, but rather to show us all how widespread and engrained the current system is.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Babble on Burroughs, February 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Soft Machine (Paperback)

Well Burroughs fans. I'd have to say that this one was saturated in the normal Burroughs magic; however, there was also an inaccessible amount of babble in the cut-up style. So overall, a good, hard read...of course...no pun intended.