The Soft Machine (Paperback)

~ William S. Burroughs (Author) "I WAS WORKING the hole with the sailor and we did not do bad..." (more)
Key Phrases: wanta screw, cock flipped, rectal mucus, World's End, Danny Deever, Puerto Joselito (more...)

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.

Product Description

In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st THUS edition (September 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802133290
• ISBN-13: 978-0802133298
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #311,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 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

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

4 of 4 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)

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.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a silencer to your head, August 19, 1998

By A Customer

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.