Tristessa by Jack Kerouac Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tristessa
Book Review: On Tristessa
Summary: 5 Stars
Well, Jack Kerouac does it again with his beautifully melancholic, poetic prose. His descriptions of something as simple as the floor where he stays is enough to draw tears. His wonderfully drug-induced rantings of the beauty of "morphina" and the Virgin Mary Statuette are emotionally charged enough to make anyone a spiritual drug-addicted Buddhist with Catholic images and intense philosophical thought. Definitely worth reading.Book Review: Probably the best Kerouac you never hear anyone talking abot
Summary: 5 Stars
One generally expects the same formula from most Beat literature--the booze, the hallucinations, the existential bellyaching, the dragged-through-the-gutter version of life in its happiest sense (?). This novel departs from the general formula in one key respect, that this is primarily a love story. It is a graphic, somewhat brutal, but always honest telling of how someone so beautiful and so disturbed can touch you and claw at you simutaneously. The heroine has no apologies for her lifestyle, nor should she have any. She is happy as anything to go through life in a narcotic haze, asleep with her sick kittens and her chickens. She is no victim as should never be considered as such. Jack's romanticism over Tristessa is heightened due to his refusal to talk in an overtly sexual manner. She attains a certain perfection in the state she is in, in a sense pure. Jack's descriptions of her reflect that purity. He is in love, but maintains it from a distance, unrequited. He doesn't attempt to soil it with his grubby hands. Not that it's a prim and proper woman we're talking about. But Tristessa is disturbing beautiful in Jack's eyes, and it is Kerouac's gift to tell us this with passion and honesty you don't generally find. It's been four years since I read it, and Tristessa's chilldlike broken phrase, "but the Lord, he loav me more", still sticks with me.Book Review: Romance that could never Be
Summary: 5 Stars
The first thing that struck me about this book was the way it ends. It ends with an ellipsis. How many books to you read that end like that? Not many would be my guess. As for the story this book is more about the voice of Kerouac. He is exposing more of himself than in any other book. The book is less about a story and more about to be Kerouac in Mexico, without anything to give him comfort. Rather he is lost in himself, drunk and confused. He finds a woman who he wants to be with. Someone he can hold someone her can touch, yet the problems lies in the fact that he can't tell her. Yet you can read between the lines and see a man who is giving up upon himself. Faced with uncertainty, wavering from his strong Buddhist beliefs. This book is more personal than I ever knew. This book can almost be seen as Kerouac moving against what he believed. Everything comes into question. The fact that Tristessa is addicted to drugs, plays on the point of what is he to do? On the one hand he loves her and on the other he can't bring himself to tell her that.
I have loved this book from the first time I read it when I was a junior in high school. The beauty of this book is amazing can never be stated enough. This is a must read for any Kerouac fan.
Book Review: Sketchings Of Love And Sympathy
Summary: 5 Stars
One of my favorite Kerouac novels and one that is the quickest to read. Kerouac assumes a Romanticist pose when writing this book, centered around his formidable relationship with junkie-prostitute in Mexico City. Allegorical tableaux of chickens and cat is insightful as well as entertaining. Nice sketchings, the book is filled with Love-Fear-and-Sympathy all in one. I recommend this book for those who loved the boplike flow of On the Road and dug the imagery of Dr. Sax.Book Review: Tristessa
Summary: 5 Stars
Many readers who love Kerouac consider "Tristessa" one of his finest novels. "Tristessa" has become the book of Kerouac that I return to most often. The book was initially rejected for publication, and it first appeared in paperback in 1960 following the success of "On the Road". The book initially may have been conceived as part of "On the Road." "Tristessa" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style, with long rhythmic improvisational sentences and the feel of jazz. It is short, but deceptively complex, introspective, romantic, and sad. When I first read the book, I was taken by the descriptive passages and didn't pay much attention to the progression of the story. In my most recent reading, I got more from the story itself.
"Tristessa" consists of two short parts, each of which tells the story of the first-person narrator, Jack, as he makes two visits to Mexico City separated by about a year. Jack is in love with a morphine-ridden prostitute named Tristessa. In part 1 of the book, "Trembling and Chaste" we see the ambiguous relationship between Jack and Tristessa. The reader meets Tristessa in her shabby room, surrounded by other addicts, including her supplier, a man named El Indio, and by cats, dogs, chickens,and by a crucifix over her bed. Jack is with her, but he leaves and takes the reader on a tour through the underside of Mexico City, rife with poverty, drugs, and prostitutes. The scenes with Tristessa are interlaced with discussions of suffering, religion and Buddhism. Jack is in love with Tristessa, but he has taken a vow of sexual chastity which he reluctantly tries to honor. Tristessa appears to be in love with Jack.
In the year that intervenes between the two parts of the novel, Jack works
in a fire tower in the Northwest -- this story is told in Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums." When he returns to Mexico City as narrated in part 2 of the book, Tristessa's life has deteriorated as she has become more hopelessly addicted. Kerouac's friend Old Bull Gaines (William Burroughs) is also in love with Tristessa as is her supplier of drugs, El Indio. Jack tries to rescue Tristessa from injury,overdose and possible death as he stays with her through the streets of Mexico City and tries to find her a home. He loses her to Gaines and realizes the impossibility of their relationship -- which, in the published text, remains unconsummated. At the close of the book, Jack dreams of writing "long sad tales about people in the legend of my life... This part is my part of the movie". And he invites the reader "let's hear yours."
"Tristessa" is a short, highly personal, and deeply moving novel. Kerouac told the story of his own troubled life in a series of novels that have stayed with me. Every person has their own story, albeit not necessarily that of the beats. Kerouac has told his, and he has challenged the reader to understand and to respond with sympathy and joy to his or her own story: "lets hear yours."
Robin Friedman