Big Sur by Jack Kerouac Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Big Sur
Book Review: Lust for life
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favourite Kerouac book. It's written with a real love for life and America's nature. Kerouac is a master in showing life is full of opportunities waiting for you, although the whole of society is created to teach a man not to see those opportunities. The end is surprisingly claustrophobic. Very, very good stuff.Book Review: A book for non-poseurs
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this book. It's deeply flawed and that's what makes it perfect. I read it some years ago while on a trip through the American Southwest and ever since then I occassionally pick it up and read around in it, as William Saroyan used to say, and every time I fall into the spell of JK's writing. "Big Sur" is heartfelt and true like few other novels. I'm sick of the whole Beat revival but this is a great, sad book, better and more honest, I think, than Kerouac's more famous "On the Road."Book Review: This may be the best of all Kerouac books.
Summary: 5 Stars
It has been about seven years since I have read this book, but it remains my favorite book by my favorite author of novels. The reason I give this review is because I am about to embark on a critical analysis of it for class. I hope that I come out of this sea of emotion with my breath still even! Out of all of his books this one portrays the crux of Kerouac's life dilemma. If one wants to read unbridled travel narrative, then s/he should go to "On the Road". If one wants to capture all the splendor of the youthful Beat mysticism at its prime, then "Dharma Bums" is likely the best bet. For sheer emotiveness, however, "Big Sur" is possibly without parallel in American literature.
There is one scene that overflows with passion and entreaty to the cosmos. He is involved in a tortuous love affair as he attempts to get off of alcohol. All of this yearning and pathos piles into his psyche and all his mind can do is scream. I don't know about all of the rest of us, but this is a way that I have felt in my life. I am glad there is a novelist like Kerouac who succeeded in publicizing the essential anguish of the American tradition.
If anyone wants to correspond with me on the matter of this book and others by him, please do so. Fresh and contemporary voices will add immeasurable breadth and meaning to my research project. Good day!
Book Review: A new perspective?
Summary: 5 Stars
"Cliches are cliches because they are truisms and truisms and truisms because they are true.....". Paraphrasing maybe but the essence of Kerouacs self-fulfilling prophecy is elementary and perhaps helps us to pause and think of the basics. Millions have read it and millions will try and tell you that 'they' know what it means, but these are hero-worshipers and vain in the extreme. Take time to write that letter to the friend you haven't heard from in years, visit the old haunts and sit down and read that book again. This time it seemed to whisper in MY ear a lesson in how not to live. He sure could write though!Book Review: Kerouac's soul painfully exposed
Summary: 5 Stars
Over the past two weeks I read, as a trilogy of sorts, 'On the Road', 'Dharma Bums' and finally 'Big Sur'. The word that comes nearest to describing 'Sur' is devastating. Kerouac's realization that his past as 'happy poet' was filled with human pride and ignorance of the pain of others ripped my heart out, after my feeling his deep love of life in the two previous books. It's a truism, but as Kerouac himself said, 'truisms are all true', but one can never feel the pain of others, and only through our own pain, can we even begin to touch the feelings of humanity. But in 'Big Sur', one comes close to feeling the grit and sweat and bleeding of Kerouac's soul