Big Sur

by Jack Kerouac

Overview

Jack Duluoz (Kerouac) ha publicado una novela (En el camino) que ha alcanzado un gran éxito, pero la fama es como una fiera que lo devora. Huyendo de la imagen que los críticos y los lectores se han forjado de él, en junio de 1960 se refugia en una cabaña que su amigo Lorenzo Monsanto (Lawrence Ferlinghetti en la vida real) tiene en la costa californiana de Big Sur, entre San Francisco y Los Angeles, donde medita, sufre alucinaciones, escribe, bebe como un cosaco, evoca el pasado. También hace excursiones y va a ver a su viejo amigo Neal Cassady (su compañero de aventuras de En el camino, aquí Cody Pomeray). Sus encuentros con los antiguos amigos no carecen de consecuencias, pues todos excepto él parecen haber aceptado los convencionalismos del mundo en que viven. La estancia en Big Sur es una prueba de fuego, un purgatorio cristiano o uno de los transitorios infiernos budistas que le permitirán volver a la civilización completamente transformado. En la nota inicial de esta novela, el autor confiesa que todos sus libros forman parte de una sola obra, «La leyenda de Duluoz», en la que quería aunar todo el experimentalismo posible, combinar la experiencia exterior con la interior. Big Sur es la máxima expresión de esta poética.

Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco, he chronicles a ruinous alcoholic bender with searing psychological candor. Kerouac displays full mastery of pace, structure, and idiom in Big Sur, a tale that ends with a crescendo as finely wrought and poignant as any in American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788433913371
Publisher:	Anagrama
Publication date:	04/30/2023
Edition description:	Spanish-language Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,083,157
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

Table of Contents

Contents

Author’s Note v

Big Sur 1

Character Key 178

Biographical Timeline 179

Editorial Reviews

"In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac's best book . . . certainly, he has never displayed more 'gentle sweetness.'"
—San Francisco Chronicle 

"Kerouac's grittiest novel to date and the one which will be read with most respect by those skeptical of all the Beat business in the first place."
—The New York Times Book Review 

"Big Sur is so devastatingly honest and painful and yet so beautifully written....He was sharing his pain and suffering with the reader in the same way Dostoyevsky did, with the idea of salvation through suffering."
—David Amram

From the Publisher

Ethan Hawke doesn't just give a stellar performance. He delivers a living embodiment of Kerouac's work, sustaining a quality that’s consistently startling. This is no small feat as Kerouac’s audiobook features his legendary free-flowing stream of consciousness, following no reliable path. Hawke's confident performance is an anchor. Kerouac, weary of constant attention after his earlier works helped inspire the Beat Generation spirit of the 1950s, seeks solitude in coastal California. However, his alcoholism can't be escaped. As the story progresses, we hear a shift in tone, possibly a form of paranoia. Hawke's skill here is to project this work as a kind of a sustained open mic—his highs and lows among and between the words are like waves crashing on the rocks. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Ethan Hawke doesn't just give a stellar performance. He delivers a living embodiment of Kerouac's work, sustaining a quality that’s consistently startling. This is no small feat as Kerouac’s audiobook features his legendary free-flowing stream of consciousness, following no reliable path. Hawke's confident performance is an anchor. Kerouac, weary of constant attention after his earlier works helped inspire the Beat Generation spirit of the 1950s, seeks solitude in coastal California. However, his alcoholism can't be escaped. As the story progresses, we hear a shift in tone, possibly a form of paranoia. Hawke's skill here is to project this work as a kind of a sustained open mic—his highs and lows among and between the words are like waves crashing on the rocks. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile