On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

I loved this book in high school and I purchased it so my son could read too. Did he love it as much as me? Not at all in fact he hated it, hated the characters and found it boring. Doesn’t matter still a great book.I will say this is a budget version the quality wasn’t bookstore.

I started reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and about time, you might say. All my life, I had expected this book to be a sort of hysterical gospel of the beat generation. In a way, it is, but above all it’s a hymn to the United States, its vastness, its sadness, its poetry and melancholy. It’s got something of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie with, in the background, Ennio Moricone’s music for Once upon a time in the West. I’m glad I first went from Arkansas to Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, then New Mexico and Arizona before I read this book. I can taste the wide open vistas, the mesmerizing monotony of endless roads over perfectly flat land, the sense of emptiness in this under populated country. Also, I understand somewhat better Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the common Man. All so beautiful and heartbreaking ! Like Kerouac, but under much more comfortable circumstances, I enjoyed the impact of unexpected encounters : an Indian in New Mexico, for instance, at a service station. He’d noticed my Little Rock, Razorback T-shirt, and we started talking. “I just spent several years in Little Rock” he said. “Now, I’m going home” : a simple statement, as moving as a haiku. You could never be friends with these people ; here now, gone a few seconds later, yet they stay with you all your life.Kerouac’s style has a lot to do with the fascination one quickly feels for the novel. Style can turn an ordinary story into a magic one. Here, sentences are clear, yet enhanced now and then by poetic touches : a misleading simplicity, and no mean feat.The major drawback lies in Kerouac’s obsession with booze, beer and getting drunk. Characters in the novel - including the main character - are always complaining that they are short of money, and it’s very true that they are not exactly rolling in it, but if they didn’t drink so much, they would have enough to get by, most of the time. The story takes place in 1947. By the time I went to live in North America (Canada is the same) it hadn’t changed. For me, the year was 1963. If a man managed to take a girl to a motel with him, he also had to bring in a bottle of whiskey. Apparently, it’s still like that. What a sad, sad outlook on sex ! Getting drunk on cheap booze instead of getting drunk on each other ! When the body is fighting with 6 shots of Bourbon, orgasms are reduced to the mere release of biological tensions instead of the last movement in a grand symphony of sensations and emotions.In California, Jack meets a lovely Mexican girl with blue eyes, which prompts an old farmer to say that, at some point, “the bull jumped over the fence.” You just know that their affair is not going to last, even if it keeps on for a few weeks. Jack Kerouac’s talent means that, as a reader, you are more in love with the girl than the author ever was. There is great sadness at their parting (there is great sadness throughout the book), but love, real love, deep love is never an element of the story, and that makes it even more poignant. On the Road is a drifting odyssey of self-centred people who are not even aware that they are self-centred. It’s an ode to complicated losers.

It's the classic novel, which is interesting in itself, but the cover art and texture of the cover and pages are amazing, like books used to be. People wanted it when I was done. It was fun to experience the physical joy of books again.

If you're on the fence whether or not to purchase this book, know that it's a classic - some will love it, others will like it, and then some will hate it. You'll have to take a chance!

Written on benzadrine-induced spurts as rolls of paper fed the typewriter - a device to avoid time delay by taking out old pages and putting in new pages - Kerouac's rapid typing (kickwriting) throws the reader into the constantly moving adventure of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity on the American roads of the 1940's.Going through several T-shirts each day during the three-week writing session of this book, which basically incorporates the seven previous years of his life, Kerouac crams piles upon piles of details of the lives of Sal and Dean - the men who seem always to be on the road.It reads like a diary. But, many passages remind me of Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel." Other parts remind me of Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." His doldrums often resemble those of Nathaneal West's "The Day of the Locust" or Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays." Each of the other authors was touched by or did touch upon this author. But, the whirlwind writing, and fast-as-lightening presentation leave the reader exhilarated, exhausted and swept. This is not written like any other book prior to its time.The pace may fool some. Capote said this was not writing, this is typing. And, to some extent that is a fair statement. Language use is not artistically delivered. Plot often steps back to factual recitation of where, how fast, when and what happens next in any of the four major trips of this book. But, the feeling of recklessness, total lack of inhibition, total immaturity to run from one's responsibilities are well highlighted by this reckless, uninhibited, and immature writing style.Dean Moriarity, as stated on many occasions, is loved although he is nothing more than a con man who impregnates women nationwide and runs from them. To make Dean more hated, he runs from Sal. He runs from many of the others. Often running away while borrowing the others' money, the others' cars, the others' "stuff." He is "beat."Dean is free - he has nothing left to lose. But he is only one jail sentence away from life in prison. In spite of this fact, Dean teases the police and gets arrested numerous times for the most ridiculous of reasons. And then laughs.This is the book that defines "beat" -- whatever that means. But, in one passage, Kerouac hints about what this means when he writes, "They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining." As we learn, that group lived nomadic lives on American highways with a hobo's allowance. It is gloom of the underworld.

Veio em 4 dias mesmo com a entrega padrão, bem embalado, e sem amassados!Kerouac é um clássico! O livro é um retrato da geração beat!

Julklapp till min dotter!

An amazing tale of friendship, jazz, sadness and the life on the road. A must read!

hat Spaß gemacht zu lesen auch in einer Sprache, die nicht meine Muttersprache ist

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