Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
by William S. Burroughs
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Book Summary Information
Author: William S. BurroughsEditor: James Grauerholz
Editor: Barry Miles
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-26
ISBN: 0802140181
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Grove Press
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780802140180
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
Book Review: What quivers at the end of your fork......?
Summary: 5 Stars
= I first read this book quite a number of years ago. Reading it again, I'm struck by how fresh the "lunch" still is, hardly what one would expect from something served up nearly a half-century ago.
= Even more striking to me is to what degree this book apparently influenced me and helped to shape (some might say "warp") my outlook aesthetically, politically, and sexually...something the conformist, as well as the timid, might want to consider a warning, I suppose.
=What I didn't realize the first time around was how funny *Naked Lunch* is. Maybe you have to grow into an awareness of the black humor and dour satire here, but Burroughs is a very funny writer; in fact, there may be none funnier of modern vintage.
=Stylistically, Burroughs was writing the way the internet reads long before the internet was ever conceived. His friend Brion Gysin taught him that writing was fifty years behind painting and Burroughs aimed to make up the distance. As a whole, even today, most writers haven't come within even shouting distance of Burroughs' backside. Today, the vast majority of even "serious" novels are written as if we were still living in the 19th century. This will have to change if books are to survive the digital revolution.
=It is to a large degree Burroughs' mosaic, telegraphic, transitionless, jump-style that gives "Naked Lunch" the feel of a novel that is still ahead of its time--it moves the way the mind moves, the way the mouse moves from site to site as we surf the web, or how our thumb moves over the remote that brings us the ten thousand broadcasts available on our satellite TVs.
=And, of course, there is the controversial content, the obscene skits and x-rated routines, the drugs and perversions that forced the likes of Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to vouch for its literary value in court so as to prevent its being banned altogether. Even today there are passages that have the power to shock the upstanding and rub the politically correct the wrong way. Let's just say that "Naked Lunch" isn't likely to be an Oprah Book Club pick any time in the near future.
=There are few books that I've reread after an intervening period years that held up to my previous high estimation of them, that didn't turn out gilt in memory as being better than they were, that still had the power to surprise and affect me on a second, more mature reading as did "Naked Lunch."
=Not only did it have a profound influence on me, but I suspect it continues to influence me, and will do so going forward. "Naked Lunch" is, in my opinion, one of the seminal works of the 20th century and will eventually be seen as such when the rest of the world catches up to the avant-garde position Burroughs took up fifty years ago.
Summary of Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. Reedited by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent all-new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture."He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.
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