Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
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Book Summary Author: Jack Kerouac Introduction: Joyce Johnson Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 1995-09-01 ISBN: 1573225053 Number of pages: 409 Publisher: Riverhead Books |
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Book Reviews of the Desolation Angels
Customer Review: gotta love the guy...
Summary: 3 Stars
I have been reading Kerouac for about twenty years (but still haven't exhausted the canon). After reading Desolation Angels I think it might still be a while.You have got to love Kerouac to get through much of this book (and I do) and it is ultimately worth the effort, but what an effort! Too much of this book is "we did this, then we did that" and Kerouac's lack of contextualizing all this can get to you.
But there are always small epiphanies that make Kerouac worth reading. There are about six in this book, the best being his brief account of his sea voyage to Tangiers on a Yugoslav freighter in a storm. "It scares a seaman to hear the Kitchen scream in fear." And Kerouac's lamentation on the unfortunate popularization of the 'cool' ethos: "But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair listening to their awful 'likes' and 'like you know' and 'wow crazy'...All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing!"
Much of what makes Kerouac one of the American Big Three is that nobody else could get away with writing like this. It ain't pretty and it's often exasperating, but what a Great Soul.