Rating: 
Summary: Quite a ride
Review: That this book is considered a literary classic is probably due more to its utter uniqueness for its time period than its literary merit. I realized halfway through, and Burroughs says it in the "Atrophied Preface," that you can pick this book up, start at any page in it, and not lose any of its narrative. That should tell you something about the narrative, or lack thereof. As for the imagery, it is perhaps some of the most vile, violent, grotesque depictions of hell or nightmare I have ever read. Parts of it made me physically queasy. In that regard, it is a powerful book and I applaud Burroughs' abilities. At the same time, though, I admit I enjoyed very little of this book. Working in a creative profession, I've been warned more than once about getting drunk or high and expecting it to enhance my creative output. I've tried it, and the best I've ever written drunk is hardly coherent sober. That's how I felt about much of Naked Lunch. When a master of Burroughs' obvious literary talent shoots up and then spills his head onto the page, there are bound to be moments of brilliance and depth. But as a whole, perhaps I would have enjoyed reading this more had I not been completely sober.
Rating: 
Summary: Breakthrough in Tangiers
Review: There has been much written about Naked Lunch, so much that the basic facts can be stated from memory: written in Tangiers while the author was addicted to heroin, edited by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sold to Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in New York, made the author famous and ranked him with Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, suffered obscenity trials that ended literary censorship in America, filmed as a movie by David Cronenberg almost twenty five years after publication. And don't forget that Steely Dan got their name from this novel but they claim they never read it. That is the story of its life: few people have actually gotten through the whole book. It reads in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend and merge and disperse. Scatalogical routines take coherant form and read like vaudville humor from a bathroom wall, then deteriorate into filthy fragments and irreverant and often disgusting descriptions of sado-masochistic sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, everyone is gay, everyone screws teenaged North African boys, everyone is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that threaten to nauseate the reader. So what does it all mean? What is the motivation or the reasoning behind it all. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral intent all the way. He considered himself a reporter who has entered behind enemy lines, like a photojournalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. The title Naked Lunch evokes an image of someone being wised up to what they are eating. Burroughs is depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, for all vampiric systems whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, etc. By the time Burroughs wrote this novel he had suffered through decades of abuse at the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to New Mexico to Mexico City to Tangiers, all the time running from the police, none the least of reasons being that he shot his wife through the head during a drunken game of William Tell (she put a glass on her head and challenged him to shoot it off -- he lost the challenge). Burroughs was a troubled junkie from a distinguished southern family, a Harvard student who studied archeology and linguistics, who studied medicine in Vienna, who went to New York to find work and wound up hooked on heroin. He took part in the birth of the Beat Generation in 1944 before setting off on his long tortured odyssey that led to more drug addiction, the death of his wife, and the bottom that he hit in Tangiers. He went there in the mid-50's to impress the exiled community of writers including Paul Bowels (who wrote the Shelting Sky) but who rejected him because he was just a filthy junky with a gun fetish. Instead he wrote Naked Lunch. It is a descent into Hell chronicled by a man who was to become one of the best writers of the 20th Century. The events that led to the writing of Naked Lunch is chroniciled in the amazing documents known as the Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959. These letters were the source of Cronenberg's screenplay of Naked Lunch, more so than Naked Lunch itself. Read the letters first, then read Naked Lunch. Then see the movie. In that order. It will all make sense...in the end. A book that changed our cultural landscape. It never became dated. It exists outside of time and space, in the Interzone of our polluted minds.
Rating:
Summary: A Counterculture Literary Classic: Essential Burroughs
Review: What else can I say, other than that this is "the" book that has brought William S. Burroughs the most fame(infamy?) and glory. Most people interested in Beat Literature choose Kerouac for insight, but I feel that Burroughs gets to the root of the Beatniks' most defining element: Drug use/abuse. His style is unrelenting. His prose harsh and ragged, not unlike himslef for some 15 odd years of his life in which he lived as a junky. I urge the reader to not read this book in sequence from beginning to end as a traditional novel. Instead, read a chapter or two at a time. Then, set it down and leave it alone for a day. The next day, return and continue reading. Each pargraph; each page is a message unto itself. Burroughs uses a rehab center in a place called Interzone, the character William Lee, and a sadistic orgy to help convey the over-all idea that the junky is a sad and tragic individual. But, what makes the junky so tragic is not his position in life. It is the sad fact that he put himself there in the first place. And, to spite himself, the junky's body must continue this act even though his mind says no. It is sad that this book has not been given the credit that it is due. Only at the end of his life did Mr. Burroughs begin to reap the rewards of his, and his comrades' work. As though he couldn't stand another minute in the world of the straight and narrow without a friend(Allen Ginsberg, the last Beat), he died after a life of extreme hardships and bittersweet success. Needless to say, this book sums up Burroughs' early life on the streets before any real intimations of success. It is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those of you who prefer "popular" literature. It is for those of us who seek the truth, and read books about certain topics for an element of reality.
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