Rating: 
Summary: Experimental? Yes. Effective? No
Review: This is clearly a piece of Sophomoric garbage that is muddied up in order to appear deeper than it really is. It's nothing but the insane ramblings of an alcoholic who hasn't slept in a week. I think the reason it became as popular as it did is because people afraid to admit it didn't make sense developed a bunch of rhetoric about new and inventive it was. It was written similarly to Naked Lunch but with less power. Sentences run on lasting for over a page at times. Everyonce in awhile an accidental good idea appears in the book but is usually covered up by garbled mesh.
Rating: 
Summary: Tragic rolling hip love story from the master of free form.
Review: This is the best book I have ever read. The story, the characters, the mood, the language is all like a gray sunset morning on a dirty street in San Francisco. Kerouac is a poet and a story teller. His words are paranoiac but tender. He tells of his experience with a band of underground hipsters know as 'the subterraneans' in the context of a mad drunken love affair with Mardou Fox, an angst ridden angel of the city
Rating:
Summary: Beat Surrender
Review: This isn't Jack's best. In "On the Road" Dean Moriarty plays Huck to Sal's Tom Sawyer: a good kid at heart but prone to trouble with his wild friend. Here Leo Percepied's the bad boy, getting drunk, embarassing friends and hurting lovers with no one to blame but himself. The joy and big-hearted optimism of "On the Road" give way to boozy self-recrimination as the author berates himself for messing things up with Mardou. The subterraneans of the title are a cool, intellectual, heroin-addled set that Leo has little time for; they're mostly a backdrop for his relationship with Mardou. Kerouac examines their love, from Leo's point of view anyway, in microscopic detail, but some of his confessions were startling to me--that he'd never get serious with a black woman, for instance, because it would ruin his fantasy of living down South like Faulkner. I'm probably just getting old, but where Sal Paradise seemed urgent and searching, Leo struck me as selfish and immature, aware that he needs to grow up but not really wanting to. Where Sal wanted kicks, Leo wants love. That's a trickier (more adult?) proposition and I'm not sure Kerouac rose to the challenge, in this novel or in life. Don't get me wrong--I'm a big Kerouac fan. "On the Road" and "Mexico City Blues" just hit the ball harder for me. If you get a chance, see the movie version of "The Subterraneans" with George Pepard as Leo, Mardou as white (?!) and Roddy McDowell as a bongo-beating beatnik. Hollywood at its finest!
Rating:
Summary: Dynamic look at the creative and emotional drives of Kerouac
Review: This short novel--the third novel of Kerouac's to be published--is written with nonstop ferocity. The narrator, Leo Percepied, Kerouac's alter-ego here, tells with rapid-fire think-speak the story of his love affair with Mardou Fox, one of the San Francisco "subterreaneans" (nee " the Beats"). (As one reviewer already pointed out, the novel was supposed to be set in New York City but was changed for legal reasons.) Leo seems interested in Mardou partly "because she was Negro" (p. 2). Part of Kerouac's romanticization of the African American experience in his writings (see, for instance, the "joy, kicks, darkness" passage in "On the Road" and his exaltation of Charlie Parker as a Buddha-like figure in "Mexico City Blues") is partially explained here when he writes of Mardou, "no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity" (p. 36). Kerouac was genuinely attracted to suffering--at least at this point in his life--as a heroic ideal, which was often embodied, for him, in the American-minority experience. Kerouac reportedly wrote the novel in three days while on some uppers and it shows. "The Subterraneans" jumps and juts in-between thoughts and ideas without any cues, and is chock-full of incomplete and run-on sentences. At first, the furious pace is quite engaging and fun, but, predictably, it becomes tiresome (this is most evident when Leo retells Mardou's story about her nervous breakdown). Although of minor interest in the overall scope of literature, it is a must read for any fan of Kerouac, as it describes the dynamics of his drive to write in 1953. For instance, he seems more committed to writing than to loving Mardou. Mardou tells Leo that men "are so crazy, they want the essence, the woman is the essence, there it is right in their hands but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions" (p. 16). Ultimately Leo leaves her to erect the [little] abstract construction known as "The Subterraneans." Leo also exhibits disappointment at the fact that Mac Jones (based on John Clellon Holmes and his big advance for the publication of his novel "Go" in 1952) was given a huge advance to write about the stuff he had been writing about for years with little to show for it in the way of compensation. Along with glimpses into the destructive alcoholic tendencies of Kerouac, which seem to have been romanticized since his death, "The Subterraneans" is a very insightful look into the lives of Jack Kerouac.
Rating:
Summary: Dynamic look at the creative and emotional drives of Kerouac
Review: This short novel--the third novel of Kerouac's to be published--is written with nonstop ferocity. The narrator, Leo Percepied, Kerouac's alter-ego here, tells with rapid-fire think-speak the story of his love affair with Mardou Fox, one of the San Francisco "subterreaneans" (nee " the Beats"). (As one reviewer already pointed out, the novel was supposed to be set in New York City but was changed for legal reasons.) Leo seems interested in Mardou partly "because she was Negro" (p. 2). Part of Kerouac's romanticization of the African American experience in his writings (see, for instance, the "joy, kicks, darkness" passage in "On the Road" and his exaltation of Charlie Parker as a Buddha-like figure in "Mexico City Blues") is partially explained here when he writes of Mardou, "no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity" (p. 36). Kerouac was genuinely attracted to suffering--at least at this point in his life--as a heroic ideal, which was often embodied, for him, in the American-minority experience. Kerouac reportedly wrote the novel in three days while on some uppers and it shows. "The Subterraneans" jumps and juts in-between thoughts and ideas without any cues, and is chock-full of incomplete and run-on sentences. At first, the furious pace is quite engaging and fun, but, predictably, it becomes tiresome (this is most evident when Leo retells Mardou's story about her nervous breakdown). Although of minor interest in the overall scope of literature, it is a must read for any fan of Kerouac, as it describes the dynamics of his drive to write in 1953. For instance, he seems more committed to writing than to loving Mardou. Mardou tells Leo that men "are so crazy, they want the essence, the woman is the essence, there it is right in their hands but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions" (p. 16). Ultimately Leo leaves her to erect the [little] abstract construction known as "The Subterraneans." Leo also exhibits disappointment at the fact that Mac Jones (based on John Clellon Holmes and his big advance for the publication of his novel "Go" in 1952) was given a huge advance to write about the stuff he had been writing about for years with little to show for it in the way of compensation. Along with glimpses into the destructive alcoholic tendencies of Kerouac, which seem to have been romanticized since his death, "The Subterraneans" is a very insightful look into the lives of Jack Kerouac.
Rating:
Summary: Kerouac does it again.
Review: When you think of the 1950's, you envision carhops, Beaver Cleaver and Buddy Holly. What you don't think of is an underground world of sex and drugs dominated by poets and addicts. Kerouac wrote this exquisite book in two days- that shows how much of a master he is of his craft. This tragic plot line follows two people in love through the highs and lows of their relationship. Extremely poetic and extremely real, this book is a must read for everyone.
Rating:
Summary: music as words EASY TO BE swept up in ONSLAUGHT
Review: who cares about the story , i didnt i WAS SWEPT UP IN ITS ENERGY! THE AUDACITY OF IT, ITS LIKE HES COMPOSING SONE GREAT ORATORY SOME WALTZ,stompELECTRONIC MORSE CODE, CARRY ME HIGH conceit ... glorious, BETTER THAN EVER,SWEPT UP IN feat of it all dizzy, type type glory. Musical in the extreme.TAP TAP,KEYS TO THE FITH dimesion words chasing symbols swept up in some TORRENT OF compose the vowels of HUNGER FOR, lifes appetites,TOO hail the power and glory of it all,
Rating:
Summary: jazz in prose
Review: you can't get closer to the essence of jazz than this. beautiful
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