Customer Reviews

The Soft Machine

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

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.

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.

It's the logical answer to Burroughs Naked Lunch that served us the sliced up meal of contorted reality in order to make us see the truth. The battle is now raging in the language itself. And therefore in our own minds. The sentences with which humanity has manipulated its existence are under siege. Their order is cut up in the hope that through the black holes that are thus struck in them we may reach the silence so we may hear what's going on. Sometimes this means we have to struggle through a heap of rubbish, until we are no longer repelled by it and are free from its diseases. As a reward new ways of giving words to things are singing their strange but compelling songs to us in phrases that defy one dimensional meaning. The real sound of silence. To make us realize that these experiments are more than 'thoughtplays' and to keep us engaged in the process of 'unwriting' glimpses of stories weave themselves into this amalgam of prosepoetry and cut up text. In awe we get almost too physical views of the warfare and the journeys and haunts that accompany it, all on a science fiction and futuristic level. Details of this Nova Mob detective like narration are given to us in the next part of the trilogy, without entirely raising the curtain. It's a see for yourself message Burroughs is giving.

"The Soft Machine"... the second excerpt from Burroughs' 1000 page manuscript of garbled chaos, written in Tangiers during a big, several year long heroin binge.

The origins of this writing are clear in the text... Burroughs' obsession with 'junk' is extreme, as is his fixation on orgiastic sex and sexually deviant practices. At least 50% of the book could be considered erotica if it weren't so intermingled with imagery of death and deformation that any aphrodisiac effect is squashed like a bug. This book is unparalleled in its obsessive obscenity, but there are visuals and concepts here that could not come from a sane mind, ideas that easily transcend into the realm of genius.

There is no plot, and unlike the preceding "Naked Lunch", the chapters can't even really be thought of as short stories. The incoherency factor is scaled up to the next level with the increased use of the "cut-up method". It is not a novel.

I think Burroughs was onto something with this idea, but that it makes "Soft Machine" a work that in the end is often little more than a nigh-random word salad, wherein any meaning taken really comes from the reader's mind. It will forever be a literary oddity, and many will find it absolutely impossible to read. Just as many will likely be turned away by its absolute depravity.

But there is something original and real in this book. Something beyond the normal world.

very good when it is... drags a bit when its not... still you can find something good in it everywhere... skip to Mayan Caper chapter for a more linear story line...

In The Soft Machine, Burroughs goes into a `fit' and forces his will on the reader. Your mind is filled with pictures of 1920's movies and dusty postcards.

I'll be honest with you; it was not an easy read for me. Early in the book I, for a second or two, pictured a disgruntled, rogue typesetter jumbling up the words and sentences in a way to get back at `the man' by confusing the hapless purchaser of the book. It twists and turns and comes back through the middle and it is intentional. But when you are finished, there are fragmented pictures forming a larger whole. I believe that this book is a brilliant Rorschach Test of Bill Burroughs' thoughts. I don't want to speak of plot or of what happens in the book for this reason. For me to do that would take away from your experience. I will, however, recommend that you read Burroughs' books, Junk(y), Queer, and The Naked Lunch (in that order) before attempting The Soft Machine.

If you fancy yourself a mental detective/masochist, read The Soft Machine first, Naked Lunch second, Queer third, and then Junk(y). The pieces will fall together for The Soft Machine and the torn asunder chunks of Burroughs' Rorschach puzzle will fall into a pile with the old movies and postcards stuck together with carbolic soap and rectal mucus.

Heroin may have inspired some great works of art, but this collection of disjointed, rambling phrases is not one of them. "cut-up" technique entails taking a piece of writing and scrambling bits and pieces of it at random, so the finished product reads like the stream of consciousness of someone with serious brain damage. Linearity? Plot? Character development? Don't bother looking for them here.

Here's a small sample of the text (asterisks added to make it past Amazon censors):

Drinking from his eyes the idiot green boys plaintive as wind leaves erect wooden phallus on the graves of dying Lemur Peoples.
"Fluck flick take any place. Johnny you-me-neon-***hole-amigos-now."
"You only get a hard-on with my permission."
"Who you now Meester? Flick fluck take Johnny over. Me screw Johnny up same ***hole? You make flick fluck one-piece?
Just hula hoop through each other to idiot Mambo. Every citizen of the area has a blueprint like some are Electricals and some are Vegetable Walking Carbonics and so on, it's very technical. boy jissom tracks through rectal mucus and Johnny.
"One track out so: panels of shadow."
"Me finish Johnny night."
So we get our rectums in transparent facilities blue route process together.


... and on and on, for 180 pages. Every once in a while, an amusing sentence or phrase pops up, like "Trak News Agency - 'We don't report the news - We write it." But a handful of rather obvious observations about the global power structure do not come close to making up for an endless repetition of short gay sex scenes and total gibberish. This book is effective at inducing a headache, but that's about it.

A satyrical ride across boundless waves, an insane book that may be difficult to read, but can also flow like a faucet once into the pages. It jumps and leaps like a frog on smack, but has more than a few laughs and can produce some serious imaging that you may wish you never had. A book in the Burroughesque style of insanity.

I think the genius comes in when Burroughs takes the stories apart and scrambles them back together to make silly but surreptitiously truthful little sideswipes at reality.