Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by Richard Farina
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard FarinaIntroduction: Thomas Pynchon
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-05-01
ISBN: 0140189300
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Book Review: Novel with strong polarized opinions. Good reason to try it.
Summary: 5 Stars
`Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me' by first time author and folksinger, Richard Farina is firmly established among the cult classics of 20th century English literature, along with all the other books such as `Lord of the Flies', `Lord of the Rings', `Catch-22', `Catcher in the Rye', `Animal Farm, and `1984' one simply had to read when I was a high school and college student in the 1960's. Before I started this review, I happened to see a gratifyingly large number of reviews of this book, almost forty years after its publication and the author's untimely death.
What surprised me were the few, but well thought out negative, one star reviews. I can appreciate that this book may not be to everyone's taste. I could never quite fathom why my uncle could never make it past the first page of `The Hobbit', but then, he was an Ernest Hemingway man, so I never pushed the point. I am much more disappointed when my young second cousins don't seem to be captivated by the charm of their first exposure to a Hobbit hole. But I digress.
So, I decided to see if I could answer some of the points mad by the critics.
For starters, I am reluctant to dissuade anyone from reading any work of fiction. The evidence of my tastes versus those of my uncle show that narrative which may strike one person like a Mike Tyson blow to the viscera may simply leave someone else as cold as a frozen squid. Unlike my initial contact with Tolkein through a reference to `Lord of the Rings' by a fellow student in a class on Shakespeare, or my first encounter with Stephen King by noticing that Stanley Kubrick was to be making a movie of `The Shining', I have no memory of how I decided to pick up Farina's novel. I know it was while I was in college and I can recall the impact of those first two pages as clearly as if I had read them yesterday.
All of this is an attempt to address those who say that this novel is not as good as works by William Burroughs, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Pynchon, and Jack Kerouac. I approach this argument lightly because I deal with similar arguments every time I write a cookbook review. But then, cooking is different from fiction. In spite of some wide variations in taste, there are better and worse ways to make a chicken stock. If you heat it too high or cook it too long or put in too many vegetables, your stock will simply not be as good as it you religiously followed that recipe from the Culinary Institute of America or any one of a hundred other sound books on culinary basics. My personal reaction to this argument is that I have tried to read the works of William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell, Thomas Pynchon, and Jack Kerouac, and many of these have left me cold, especially works by Durrell and Kerouac. I liked `Naked Lunch', but I appreciated the talent without the visceral punch. I really enjoyed Miller's `A Devil in Paradise', but that was non-fiction. I really respect Pynchon, but he has never been able to draw me into his longer works. Durrell and Kerouac simply leave me cold.
The classic aesthetic argument is that those who have broad experience in reading and thinking about an art form best determine issues of quality. For that reason, I find a certain respect for the opinions of those who have read widely in Farina's contemporary writers, but I must submit that the book's language holds a power which should not be denied, especially if you are or were recently a college student. I confess the book may have lost some of its immediacy since the end of the draft and the Vietnam War; however, recent threats may bring back the feelings that leant such relevance to the life of the principal characters.
This brings me to the second major argument I have seen. This is the claim that there are no admirable characters in this book, or at least no characters with which one can identify. I am inclined to dismiss the objection that there are no admirable or noble characters, as I think good fiction is filled with lead characters for which I have no admiration. Shakespeare's tragedies alone are filled with characters with `issues'.
The central tragedy of this story is that lead character Gnossos Pappadopoulis imagines, throughout the first part of the book, that `I am invisible, ... And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not loose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess no valence.' This `coolness' of course leads to several picaresque events in the first part. Things start going wrong when he gains a valence by affection for a particular co-ed. The tragedy is complete when he literally looses his `exemption' and becomes subject to the draft by loosing his student status. It ain't Macbeth, but it is both distressing for those who identify with Gnossos and satisfying for those who feel Gnossos deserved his come-uppance.
I must confess that since I did tend to identify with Gnossos Pappadopoulis, I have always been a bit distressed by the ending, and doubly distressed that Farina was not around to write a sequel. But then, this has not kept me from rereading the whole book several times and reading selected passages many more times.
This is a cheap paperback. If you like it, you will like it very, very much. If you don't like it, give it to a friend.
More Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) reviews:
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Summary of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
In this title, Farina evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering - among other things - mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth.This is the ultimate novel of college life during the first hallucinatory flowering of what has famously come to be known as The Sixties. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me follows haunted ur-hippy Gnossos Pappadopoulis upon return to his old university town that's just tilting into a new era, and Gnossos' involvement in a swirl of sixties-style drug taking and the search for love and the meaning of it all. It is a hilarious and haunting book.
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