Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31036 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Synopsis
The anarchic, phenomenally strong-selling classic from the godfather of the Beats, featuring for the first time the restored text, all the accompanying essays, and newly discovered material from the original manuscript. Revitalised with a cool new jacket and an anecdote packed P.S. section. WELCOME TO INTERZONE! Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Check yourself into the hospital where Dr Benway works - but don't expect adrenalin if you need it (the night porter shot it up for kicks). Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, and his greatest creation, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man', a marvel of invasive psychiatry who has been reduced to nothing but a spinal cord. Told by an Ivy League-educated narcotics addict, Naked Lunch juxtaposes two journeys: the narrator's physical progress from America to North Africa, via Mexico, and a terrifying descent into his own altered consciousness. In this "Interzone", loosely based on Burroughs' temporary home Tangier, sex, drugs and murder are the most basic of commodities, and the basest desires have become completely banal.

Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating and mordantly funny, Naked Lunch takes us on an exhilarating ride through the darkest recesses of the human psyche - a ride which stunned the literary world when first published in the repressed 1950s, and is still guaranteed to epater more than a few bourgeois. Over forty years after first publication, Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs' longtime editor James Grauerholz have compiled this definitive restored text, correcting numerous errors that have accumulated over the years, and incorporating all of Burroughs' notes and accompanying essays. Most exciting of all, this edition includes an appendix of newly discovered, never before seen material - including alternate drafts from the original manuscript and letters from Burrough's private correspondence.

Customer Reviews

Rubbish
This is a book for sad people who like to think they're cool and clever - like most of the `beat' texts. It plays with being difficult and wallows in degradation for the sake of it.

Having read enough difficult books to be able to tell the difference between honest and necessary difficulty on the one hand and self-indulgent confusion on the other, I can confidently put The Naked Lunch in the second category.

As far as the subject matter is concerned, I've seen enough to be fairly unshockable, and I can look at it calmly enough to recognise self-indulgent wallowing when I see it.

If you really want to read something difficult for the sake of it, you're better reading a book that's also rewarding and meaningful, like Finnegans Wake. James Joyce has vistas of significance and depths of humanity that Burroughs can't hold a candle to.

I first became aware of Burroughs a long time ago, in my teens, but never got round to reading him. In the meantime I've read a lot of books in the course of getting a master's degree in literature. Some are worthwhile. Others aren't. Some are merely hyped-up trash. This is one of the latter.

... and funny
OK, it's black, bleak, about control and the "algebra of need" ... and startlingly funny!

Knowing the score
You don't need me to tell you this is a great book. Writing has never been this good.

But are you ready for it?

The images are out there. The style is out there. If you haven't been out there with Burroughs, you may want to start with a similar message in a more traditional form, namely his trilogy that begins with "Cities of the Red Night".

But the power is here in this book. The power of the truths about control, about desperate needs, about everything that is lurking beneath even well-structure, settled lives.

If you're studious, then after the thrill of Naked Lunch, if there is an "after Naked Lunch", you can grow your understanding of your social conditioning with Peter Handke's play "Kaspar" and with B.F.Skinner's study "Verbal Behavior" (read Skinner's "Science and Human Behavior" before "Verbal Behavior"). These are all you need to be able to stand on your own two feet. But start with Naked Lunch to get the jolt you'll need to start understanding how the control systems have you pinned down.

Heroin addiction and outlandish s*x are only small adornments in "Naked Lunch", the escapes could have been instead workaholism and fundamentalism, or reading books and writing Amazon reviews. But you probably wouldn't be drawn to a book about Amazon book reviewers. Still, Naked Lunch isn't describing anything far away. It's not "out there" after all but right in our guts. Enjoy.