On The Road CD by Jack Kerouac
|
Our Price: $19.95 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $9.99 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of On The Road CD
Book Review: Really great
Summary: 5 Stars
It was with some trepidation that I started listening to this, but am really glad I did.
Matt Dillon does a great job - his metre, tone, pacing and the the "world-weariness" in his voice are all just right in my opinion.
I enjoy listening to it almost as much as I enjoy reading the book.
Highly recommended.
Book Review: Perfect presentation!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Matt Dillon's presentation was superb -- he brought the characters to life. Especially, Dean, with his slow, distant, unique way of talking ... it was like Dean was really there.
I would very much recommend this audio CD to anyone who likes On the Road. Very, very well done.
Book Review: Loved the Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Matt Dillion was terrific in this reading. I suppose it's a question of
tastes, however. I thought his portrayal of Dean Moriarity was so compelling and very, very funny. I felt I knew the characters after listening to this CD.
Book Review: A new audio book lover is born...
Summary: 4 Stars
On the Road is my very first audio book ever. I've tried audio books in the past, but they always seemed to be narrated by some suave fella with a buttery English accent, and I would inevitably end up face-down on my bed, snoring away within 5-7 minutes of beginning. When I began to commute for a total of 80 minutes a day (round trip), I quickly tired of listening to the same music time and again. Although I have an 8gb iPod nano, you can only cram so much music on the thing. After I gave up finding a decent radio station, I was left with one simple option. Give audio books another try.
On the Road seemed an obvious choice for two reasons. 1) I was turning to audio books because I was "on the road" so much (har har) 2) I haven't been able to read it. That is, its rambling style tends to put me to sleep almost as quickly as a British man reading at me. Yet, I've always wanted to complete it despite my doomed attempts, and the recent publication of Kerouac's original scroll sort of bewitched me. I was completely ignorant of the great Kerouac myth before I decided to listen to this book. I had no idea the length of time that Kerouac and his cronies spent traveling the country. I hadn't the foggiest idea that he wrote the book on one long, uninterrupted scroll of paper (120 feet). Or that Kerouac composed the novel in a three-week rush of writing fueled by endless cups of coffee and--though Kerouac adamantly denied it--probably Benzedrine.
But enough of the back story...let's get to the book! I listened to an unabridged audio version narrated by Matt Dillon, and for that aspect alone, I expected to have problems with it. Matt Dillon is generally considered, by me, a boil on the butt of humanity. His teeth bother me, his face bothers me, his voice bothers me. But, somehow, he was able to make On the Road come alive. Given, he has his readerly flaws--his syllables sometimes smashing in on one another, his characters' voices eventually crapping out and evening into something that sounds very much like "every other character." However, he has some rough wildness to his voice that did justice to Kerouac's musical, rambling, stream-of-consciousness classic.
This is one of those books, like Wuthering Heights, that offers few likable characters. They're ruffians and deadbeats and swindlers, but they're also thinkers and adventurers. I suppose the story, as I knew it would, plays into my romantic fantasies of dropping everything and just taking off. I would love to travel the country with no particular place to be for seven years. Drink with friends, intellectualize, philosophize and write, write, write. Alas, Kerouac lived, in many ways, in a dramatically different America than the one we live in today. A man could hitchhike from coast to coast, sleep around and drive his car into a muddy ditch in middle America without worrying too much about being arrested or getting knifed to death and hacked into little pieces.
I read somewhere that Kerouac's novel is a "love letter to America," and I think that's a fair assessment. He became intimately acquainted with corners of this country that most people will never see, and never care to see. His manic scribblings are interspersed with poetic, literary digressions that boggle the mind. The whole thing is one big jazz solo twittering, banging and hooting all night long.
Now, all these praises don't actually mean that I liked the book that much. That's news, eh? This is one of those tomes that I appreciate even if it bored me at times. I appreciate Kerouac's intentions far more than his prose, and when all is said and done, I really like the mythical proportions that this story and its author have grown into.
Book Review: An excellent performance of a childish novel
Summary: 4 Stars
I dislike the prose Beats; I *hate* Burroughs, while I only dislike Kerouac, but nonetheless I agree with John Updike's very funny parody of the genre called "On The Sidewalk" (from his 1965 book Assorted Prose), in which the narrator is a faux-rebellious child who takes off burning through the afternoon on his tricycle, but is too scared to cross the street alone.
But Matt Dillon's performance of this audiobook version is really excellent. He does absorbing but not overdone voices for the different characters, reads the rest of the time with a suitable world-weary tone, and (my favorite aspect of his performance) picks up on the fact that Kerouac sometimes goes on a tear of short, Hemingway-esque sentences, which Dillon reads as if they were liturgy or poetry, with a steady, incantatory beat.
There seems to be a trend of recruiting name actors to do high-profile audiobooks; Maggie Gyllenhall's The Bell Jar is even better.