Subterraneans

Rating:
Summary: THE BEBOP OF LOVE AND ALL THAT JAZZ
Review:
THE SUBTERRANEANS is a novel remarkable for a number of distinctions, not the least of which is the report that Grand Beat Master Jack Kerouac wrote it in only three days. The book's analytical depths, structural complexity, and richness of language would make one more inclined to believe it took three years to write. To read this novel is to sink into a mesmerizing whirl of bebop rhythms, uncompromising confession, and the audacity of raw images for which Kerouac and other Beat Writers were so well known. The current hoopla brewing around Ashton Kutcher's on-screen interracial relationship in the forthcoming film GUESS WHO? could make many think this is something new in popular culture. However, Kerouac's main characters in THE SUBTERRANEANS are Leo, an Anglo-American, and his love interest Mardou, an African-Native American. The interracial nature of this relationship (supposedly based on a real-life one that Kerouac had in 1953) is not ignored but neither does it dominate the novel. A question clear from the beginning is not only whether or not Leo and Mardou can successfully navigate their very intensely fragile personalities and sustain a mutually satisfying relationship, but also whether or not they can survive the excessive weights of history and bigotry. The entire culture of bebop jazz forms an important backdrop for the novel and Kerouac expresses his love for the music in short homages paid to some its giants, including saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. Likewise, a number of Kerouac's Beat pals can be found (as in other works by him) in supporting roles in this novel: Allen Ginsberg as the character of Adam Moorad; William Burroughs as Frank Carmody; and Gregory Corso as Yuri Gligoric. This a true and thoroughly enjoyable American classic from one of our most true and thoroughly enjoyable writers.
Aberjhani
author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY
and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE



Rating:
Summary: The Other Side of Kerouac
Review: "The Subterraneans," in my opinion, is a must-read for serious Kerouac fans. It doesn't exhibit the manic, adventurous, and outgoing writer that we all know from "On the Road." Instead, we hear a narrator that's seemingly insecure when dealing with his present love interest (an African American woman named Mardou Fox.) Sometimes depressed, self-depreciating, and at times even jealous! This novel is truly an account of how quickly and easily a man's whole personality can be altered by a woman that he's infatuated with. As the two characters' very different lifestyles become entangled with one another, Kerouac almost drives himself crazy with his constant speculation. If you're a die-hard fan, pick up this book as soon as possible. Aside from being simply engrossing, it's a very short read.

Rating:
Summary: The Other Side of Kerouac
Review: "The Subterraneans," in my opinion, is a must-read for serious Kerouac fans. It doesn't exhibit the manic, adventurous, and outgoing writer that we all know from "On the Road." Instead, we hear a narrator that's seemingly insecure when dealing with his present love interest (an African American woman named Mardou Fox.) Sometimes depressed, self-depreciating, and at times even jealous! This novel is truly an account of how quickly and easily a man's whole personality can be altered by a woman that he's infatuated with. As the two characters' very different lifestyles become entangled with one another, Kerouac almost drives himself crazy with his constant speculation. If you're a die-hard fan, pick up this book as soon as possible. Aside from being simply engrossing, it's a very short read.

Rating:
Summary: Young America - Bohemian Mystery, Existential Void
Review: A very Kerouac novel. The love affair of Leo Percepied and a beautiful Black/Indian girl named Mardou, who the hoodlum looking Leo, separated her from the subterranean pack. Whirling in spiral moving descriptive memories of people, places, insecurities, unconscious thoughts and affairs. There's the good, bad and the ugly, thoughts and words that you'd find in many love relationships, in this instance, in one of the beats with the crazy tea smoking, bar hopping, relational attachments, sexual encounters, distancing of themselves, interior questions of unspoken thoughts that live subconsciously, some of them from dating outside the race, from drinking excessively, from jealously and the idea of not finding or really knowing who the self really is in the beat existential movement of spontaneity, where the plan, one day, was to go to Mexico, but first to buy some clothes and Gerry Mulligan records. But in the end jealously, a lack of passion, which is very existential and yet the pattern of inability to sit still and rest becomes emotionally impossible.

The story is great Kerouac. It has this subtle sadness of existential angst, the emptiness of life as in Dostoevsky and Camus, the casual nature and lost souls of modern living and living in indulgence, drunkenness, socialness that lacks a depth of stability, a stronghold where intellectual and literary meanings can not fulfill, devoid of a centering which can not be found in the subterranean life of the late 40's - 50's avant garde.

And this appears to me as the Kerouac trademark: a jazz styled prose of spontaneous expression from the "real," non-conditioned, non-image-to-portray self, an existential life of despair in fast paced living with the rush of jazz, drink, sex, travel, under the literary and scholarly ideals of avant garde sophistication, adventure, desires, seeking new discoveries, walking places one never has been before, risk taking and traveling, all so under this empty void of utter lonely existence, devoid of substantial meanings of foundational holds and securities, walking in the desert not knowing when water will appear and if it does, if this water will sustain life or poison it. So there's this emptiness, this sadness of it all in the modern man and woman, both subterranean and beatnik.

Rating:
Summary: Limited but amazing
Review: Almost limited (as with most Kerouac books) to his own experience. But he does manage to apply his experience to the rest of us in this one. What made Kerouac great was his ability to expose himself so completely in his writing. That takes guts and it shows in his work. And because of this The Subteraneans is so amazingly honest. It would be fair to say the most honest account of a love affair in modern American history - maybe. It's a unique little book and amazingly honest.

Rating:
Summary: Kerouac puts truth, poetry, and a little madness on paper
Review: Anyone who has read more than one novel by Jack Kerouac knows that his style varies. In Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes with atypical lucidity. In Big Sur (what I think is his greatest novel), he goes an entire first chapter with the use of one period. Of the five books by Kerouac I have read (the fifth book being On The Road), Subterraneans reads the most like Tristessa. The style of each book is more fractured than in the others, making it sometimes more difficult to follow. But in each book Kerouac finds a stride and rhythm to his work that soon carries the reader away. In Subterraneans, Kerouac tells the story of a relationship with Mardou Fox, a part Native-American, part African-American, mentally barely stable, twenty-one year old woman. Though Kerouac is almost 10 years older, they seem a great match. As usual, Kerouac's tale takes him through bar- and apartment-hopping parties, intellectual upheavals, drunken sprawling adventures, and bitter hangover realizations. The thread of unity throughout is the experience of his evolving relationship with Mardou, his deep self-realizations, his anger, love, and pain. When I finished the book I knew Kerouac had once again found something true amid his temporary madnesses and put it on paper for me to read. I closed the book and felt I had read something beautiful. Kerouac, you did it again.

Rating:
Summary: San Francisco Soliloquy
Review: At the time, it is possible that my then-recent move to San Francisco colored my reading. Still, this remains one of my favorite Kerouac novels. The descriptions of the blooming Bay beat scene are hip and swirling. However, it is a moment in the railyard that has stayed with me all these years.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Kerouac Prose
Review: Blistering prose that races from the inner workings of a story that hides in the recesses of its own device. Kerouac's work begins as mere scribble, but arises into its own typewritten form of Derwellian musings, none of which can be found easily. Just as late film director René Cardonas could present an existential presence in clear yet infantile scenery, Kerouac brilliantly describes the impermanance of romantic endeavors, be they emersed in splendour, despair, or paraisic longing. Spanish literary critic José Fernandez once suggested that if we read the initial passages out loud, we can feel the nightmarish Guajardian tone that Jack Kerouac intended to convey; he speaks the truth, for this is one literary landmark that reveals itself with greater clarity when performed as spoken word. The undertow suggested in the form of the young hipster woman brings an oddly misunderstood romantic optimism; it's as if "Pierroth le Fou" and Popitekus combined their own stories to create this Beat masterpiece. This is essential reading for the admirer of the Beat Generation.

Rating:
Summary: mandy from massachusetts
Review: Each time I even glance at the book on my book shelf, i am absolutely captivated and dreamy with emotion. Somehow Kerouac taps into such real and raw, yet surreal feeling with fragmented, disconnected sections. I fell in love with the way he loved her and the way it made me see myself, as true with every reader. "'One day it'll rain on our eves, baby.'" Great book.

Rating:
Summary: Achingly honest essential Beat
Review: Every couple of years, I feel compelled to pick up this book and re-read it just to experience again the beautiful, descriptive images of Kerouac's world of love captured and love relinquished. It's really interesting how he lets us follow the relationship he fosters with this young, hipster girl from its passionate genesis to its inevitable demise. All the time, we try to steer him in certain directions, try to coax him to say and do things that will continue the romance because he makes us want it to work. Nevertheless, we are swept up in the rhythm of the prose, hanging on every emotion, applying it to similar relationships in our lives. I'd say its absolutely essential reading for people who have just severed ties with another person. The locomotive rush of the writing style painfully captures the images and burns them into our minds, often difficult and obscure in certain areas, but we understand them on a far more unconscious level. I'll probably pick it up again in the not-so-distant future. It's a classic.