Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

20 All Time Classic Sci Fi Novels - Harper Perennial Modern Classics - Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

Reviews
 

I can't get on with this book at all. It may have been worth reading when it was first printed, just for the novelty of seeing deep profanity in print. Please, give me a story line to grasp onto.
ize

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Coruscating satire, impish humour allied with the darkest mulches of despair, unrelentingly intense poetic imagery, descriptions of truly back-of-brain sexual acts, and, of course, the mugwumps. What more could one possibly want? Excellent notes and appendices too, showing not only the miracle of how years of grinding work conspired to bring about a book of extraordinary spontaneity, but also the ripples of Naked Lunch through the literary and artistic history of the last fifty years. Don't bother perusing the menu - this is the best lunch there is.
James Argles

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I read Burroughs first when I was in my teens. The homosexuality was just like reading about the sex-life of Martians or something; his whole world was so bizarre that it just seemed like part of his freak show - I thought he was just trying to be as disgusting as possible. But that's not the point about Burroughs - if you can get hold of any recordings of Burroughs reading from the Naked Lunch, or the Soft Machine, the Ticket that Exploded, or Nova Express, you'll 'get it' more - it's a sort of beat poetry, stunningly inventive, imaginative and hilarious, if patchy. A lot of fuss is made about his 'cut up technique', which is just the equivalent of scrap iron or turds in art galleries - pretentious drivel. But actually, it throws up some interesting effects when he uses it on his own stuff. You'd have to read the first four novels in a row to appreciate that - Don't worry, he only uses it here and there. I don't think he uses cut-up in this one though, which makes it an easier read than the others.
The Naked Lunch would be enough to be going on with for most people, though. David Lynch's film is great, and as good a stab at it as you could get, but it's really only a few selected scenes and themes from all his books and his life - great but not the book.

Don't expect a straightforward story, but there are recurring themes and threads, that sort of link it all together. It was apparently written in Tangier, in installments which he then posted to Allan Ginsberg, as 'reports from Interzone', just for his own amusement. Ginsberg persuaded him to publish it all. That was the story a while back. I daresay this new edition will have some new insight on all that.
As to the substance: consider when the Naked Lunch was written, and what he was writing about, and what others were writing about at the time. It's not the homosexuality that's the point, or even remarkable. While everyone else was writing about the 'cold war', he was writing about the expansion of the drug-trade, and the symbiotic and parasitic expansion of law enforcement to parallel it, using heroin as a metaphor for all sorts of parasitic political and economic forces that insinuate themselves into the human world and deliberately create a dependence, and behind them the alien, child-sacrificing Mugwumps, and the Heavy Metal Kids, alien lizards from a high density world, with all their scams and projects, like 'the Oven Gang' (the nazis). Burroughs is sometimes credited with introducing 'heavy metal' into the vocabulary, but encountered other stories about that.
I haven't read it for a while so I can only give some hints off the top of my head, but I disagree with those who say Burroughs is someone who you read when young and never revisit - he gets better with age. The Naked Lunch is a remarkable work, and a remarkable prophecy which is getting truer by the day, unfortunately - 'the moment when everyone sees what's on the end of every fork'! The most inspired and bizarred science fiction ever!
Jm Leven

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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.
Andrew

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

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