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Paperback Tristessa Book

ISBN: 0140168117

ISBN13: 9780140168112

Tristessa

(Part of the Duluoz Legend Series)

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Format: Paperback

Condition: Very Good

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Book Overview

Based on Jack Kerouac's real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a man's doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.

" Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race. . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene."--The New York Times Book Review

This short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man's ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams.

This elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young woman's pain and suffering.

Customer Reviews

17 customer ratings | 4 reviews

Rated 5 stars
Tristessa

Many readers who love Kerouac consider "Tristessa" one of his finest novels. "Tristessa" has become the book of Kerouac that I return to most often. The book was initially rejected for publication, and it first appeared in paperback in 1960 following the success of "On the Road". The book initially may have been conceived as part of "On the Road." "Tristessa" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style, with long rhythmic...

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Rated 5 stars
What's Changed?

I remember reading this about three years ago as an undergrad and not enjoying this book. I'm not sure why. I just never much liked the Beats; their experiences just seemed so foreign to mine for me to relate. But I reread this book a couple of days ago, and everything had changed. I'm just guessing that I was an idiot a few years ago, and now I'm obviously wise and intelligent and crazy and depressed enough to like this...

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Rated 5 stars
Romance that could never Be

The first thing that struck me about this book was the way it ends. It ends with an ellipsis. How many books to you read that end like that? Not many would be my guess. As for the story this book is more about the voice of Kerouac. He is exposing more of himself than in any other book. The book is less about a story and more about to be Kerouac in Mexico, without anything to give him comfort. Rather he is lost in himself,...

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Rated 5 stars
Amazing romantic novel!

The basic story line in this book surrounded a junky Mexican prostitute named Tristessa of whom Jack(Kerouac's "alias") has fallen madly in love with. Jack can't find a way to tell her, and she sends him completely mixed signals, and is constantly too hung up on her drug addiction to care about love. At one point he leaves to go up to California(in which period of time "The Dharma Bums" takes place), and the story picks up...

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Rated 5 stars
Kerouac's most overlooked novel, and his best.

Kerouac has fallen in and out of cult hero worship, for many reasons. He was the forefather of the spectacularly popular Beat Generation, his books are full of raw energy and rebellion, and he died of a brain hemorrhage watching "The Galloping Gourmet". These are all wonderful reasons to read "On the Road" or "Subterraneans". Do not read "Tristessa" for these reasons. Read "Tristessa" for its pure Kerouac voice,...

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