Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Desolation Angels
Book Review: Further reflections of a lonesome traveler
Summary: 4 Stars
I disagree with the 5-star consensus of the previous reviewers - Kerouac's writing is not 'faultless prose', as he characterizes it himself in this novel. But 'Desolation Angels' is another fascinating glimpse into the heart of this daring and nomadic - literally and spiritually - author. One star gets shaved from my review for the unfocused, enigmatic opening section of the book, 'Desolation in Solitude'. A rethinking of 'Alone on a Mountaintop' from 'Lonesome Traveler', this section only thickens the fog in both the reader and in the author, it seems. It's not that it rambles - all Kerouac's writing does, and to point it out as a flaw is like insisting that Bob Dylan's voice sucks. Of course it does, that's the point. But Kerouac characterized the Desolation Peak experience before and did it better in 'Lonesome Traveler'.However, once Kerouac makes his descent and rejoins the world in the second half of Book One and through all of Book Two, the way that his mountaintop experience informs his perspective in places like New York, Mexico, and Europe is engrossing and surpisingly intelligent. Drawing from a wide variety of influences from St. Paul to Buddha to Hemingway, Kerouac revisits familiar places and people with a broadened and more cynical point of view. Desolation Angels is more candid, forthright, even explicit, than its predecessors about drug use and sex. But it also reveals a more exhaustive spiritual hunger in Kerouac, and leads the reader to conclude that the author, in his quest to meet God, realized he had indeed found Him.
By turns a thoughtful, pensive, funny and risk-taking novel, Desolation Angels is canonical Kerouac.
Book Review: Heavenly Beat
Summary: 5 Stars
This will remain one of the sweetest, most loving books ever written in the least saccharine prose of the English language as Kerouac's alter-ego reflects from his lonely fire lookout on the essential goodness of man and then, like the two heavenly Taoist and Buddhist monks of Chinese literature, descends from his heaven to travel the physical world, bringing his spiritual insight to that world--desolation--populated by the spirits of the other--angels in all humanity, vaguely looking for that from which we came, that which is obscured by the mundaneBook Review: It was as honest as if you had spoken to a saint
Summary: 5 Stars
I fell upon this book having never heard the title before. In the beginning it was hard to get into and long-that lasted not two days before I could not put it down-their was so much feeling and meaning behind the discriptive nature of Kerouac's words that it literally made you laugh and cry out loud. It's a novel that changes your life when you come to the realization that what youve known to be true up until this point represents such a small portion of the possibilities. IT SCREAMS LIFE-EXPERIECE ALL-SEEK TRUTH. My personal favorite river of the Kerouac ocean.Book Review: Jack Kerouac Sees The Face Of ...
Summary: 5 Stars
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
"As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary "The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg", recently I have been in a "beat" generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on one of Jack Kerouac's major works, "Desolation Angels", essentially a series of `real world' job-related reflections on his time as a forest ranger in Washington state, and his subsequent "decompression" from that isolating job by travel abroad and in America with his mother in his well known spontaneous writing method at a time when he was trying to keep body and soul together, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of Kerouac's better known works dedicated to Lowell's `bad boy', the "king of the 1950s beat writers".
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, "On The Road", his classic modern physical and literary `search' for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title "The Legend Of Duluoz". That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac's death, are under the sign of his book of essays "Desolation Angels".
Sometimes one, including a frustrated writer like Kerouac who was on to something but could not get published in the early 1950s, just has to get away from it all. And what better job that a ranger in a far off mountain range where one can think, save money, and contemplate the nature of the universe. For a while at least. Then, a social being like Kerouac (at that time) needs to get back to civilization. In this case the "wilds" of San Francisco then to Europe and North Africa. And then, along the way, has to under some mysterious internal compulsion has to fulfill his self-appointed obligation to take care of `mere" (his mother) by transporting her across the country by bus to start a new life. That is the outline of the mental and physical travelogue that Kerouac, a master of this kind of descriptive writing, takes us on. In addition there are cameo appearances by many of the "regular" who we have come to know through this "Legend" saga, including the above-mentioned Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. This one rates just below "On The Road".
Book Review: Jack Kerouac at His Best
Summary: 5 Stars
Being a big fan of Kerouac's work and an avid reader, take my word when I say that this is not only the best Kerouac novel I have ever read, but also the best novel by any author that I have ever read. It has totally changed how I view life. For those of you who thought "On The Road" didn't live up to its hype, well take another chance, this time you won't be disappointed. Although it starts off slow, when you're done with it, you're going to turn it back to page 1, and read it all over again.