On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Written on a scroll, in the span of three weeks, Kerouac’s perhaps most well-renowned piece is a journey not only through America, but the human mind. It does the latter with little pretence and displays basic human emotions with a down to earth touch I believe many would like to possess themselves.

Spontaneously travelling all around America, and also delving into Mexico, visiting anything from San Fransisco and New York City to a nook on the way to Abilene, Texas, the novel, Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise; they all add up to a wonderful combination of hedonistic pursuit and a satisfaction with very little; yet very much. As they and their varying peers travel anywhere and everywhere they seek not material luxury, instead they are pleased with the luxury of life; being alive and all the experiences that simple fact entails.

Of course the 300 and something pages weren’t actually written in three weeks. The information Kerouac had gathered throughout years of travelling, the notes he had taken and so forth, were compiled in three weeks; this by no means belittling the feat itself. It is just worth to notice that writing some 300 arguably well written pages in only three weeks, just as they came along in one’s mind, would be too much to swallow for even the supernatural.

Without a doubt, On the Road has had a large cultural impact. With this book and many others by Kerouac’s contemporaries, the Beat generation became manifested, and a culture that would grow and reach even into our time was born. On the Road is said to be particularly constitutional for this generation, which is quite apparent throughout the reading; not only from the frequent actual use of the word beat as an adjective or anything else, really, but the entire atmosphere created by Kerouac’s stream of consciousness way of writing, consistent from start to end. (A little note from me here: I usually mark at least some places in the book which I when reading found especially interesting/good/whatever. Upon picking up On the Road however, there are no such marks, which I think you can safely take as a sign of just how captivating the writing is).

I would normally include some examples of sentences and such, to complete the portrait of the book I indeed am trying to accomplish; however: The very last paragraph of the book will prove more than enough to show exactly how entrancing Kerouac’s writing can be; and there is no need to explain further, the text does it all:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
When a book ends like this it’s hard to stop thinking. This end leaves the reader with such a vast expanse of possible thoughts that one doesn’t even have time to think them all. Where is Dean? What’s going to become of Sal?

Kerouac’s book is perhaps the hardest book to describe that I have attempted to do so with. He has written so grippingly about the small pleasures in life; how they can be the largest pleasure, he has written about how money is nothing, how money has no value if one sees the value in everything; then money becomes just what it is; paper and metal.

Feelings are conveyed similarly. The sadness Sal feels at times is so genuine it has no problems in leaping out of the pages and engulfing the reader; and the same goes for happiness; I found myself going ecstatic when they were the same, even though their party was more than 50 years ago, the latter which just shows how valid On the Road is today, was then and will always be.

Sadly there is so much to say about On the Road that just cannot be said here. Much of what could be said lies in reading the novel; devouring it page for page and acquiring that feeling of sitting on the bonnet of the car they are racing across the Nebraskan plains. More of what there is to say lies in reading it again, and again, and again. Personally I have only read it once; through writing this however I can’t wait to read it again.

Conclusively taking into view that On the Road is semi-autobiographical, I must say, Kerouac is a great source of inspiration, even today. If I were to invite one person over for dinner, it would be Kerouac. His values, his On the Road, his whole philosophy, if one is permitted to call it that, is mildly put, astounding. On the Road is definitely a must read of American writing.

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Mark Haddon

Pages: 226, including appendix
Language: English
Nationality: English
First published: 2003

“As a young man, Mark Haddon worked with autistic individuals” it says as part of a little author-introduction before the actual text begins. Having read the book, I can’t possibly find myself doubting this statement.

Written from Christopher John Francis Boone’s perspective, in first person, he (Christopher) narrates how he finds his neighbour’s dog dead and wants to find out who did it. He likes animals and relates to their emotions well, whereas he can’t grasp human emotions, which is part of his wish to discover the canine murderer. There are several more things he doesn’t like, and where many people behave “normally” he has a specific preference; one type of food cannot touch another on his plate; yellow food must be coloured red before being consumed, as he detests yellow and so forth. Take all these complications, add a proletarian background and family with respective problems, a pleasant teacher and a lot of Christopher’s perspective on the world, and you have a crude approximation to the actual book.

Christopher is craving to be around. Not only is he portrayed this way in the book, Haddon has very aptly made it craving for the reader too. He hasn’t done this through cryptic language or the like, however, as that clearly would have defied the whole perspective of the book, namely that of Christopher. To exemplify; upon his father finding him in his room just after having discovered that his mum in fact isn’t dead:

“Then he said, “You read the letters.”
Then I could hear that he was crying because his breath sounded all bubbly and wet, like it does when someone has a cold and they have lots of snot in their nose.”

As stated earlier, Christopher has little or no understanding of human emotions, which is evident from this extract. When he sees his father crying, he perhaps knows it’s bad, but doesn’t understand that he is supposed to feel sad too, which all amounts to him being hard to handle for the reader as well, as it is simply quite aggravating to see such a display of complete ignorance.

Without knowing a lot about autism myself, I find this book rather enlightening. It very cleverly portrays the problems entailing an autistic child, and the immense wear raising such a child exerts on the family and people around him. In other words it’s not only Christopher’s story that’s touching, but his parents’ too, how they struggle, and how we would most probably struggle in the same situation. Speaking for myself at least, it is very strong how Christopher doesn’t understand that his parents love him to the same extent that someone else would, and how he renounces his father completely just because his father killed a dog, even after he explains why he did it; an explanation I would easily have been happy with.

The book is not written very complicatedly. It is in fact quite simple, the language plain and the structure uniform. It is a joy to read, and easy, as aforementioned; which is why I read it the same day I bought it. The language being as said contributes to the portrayal of Christopher’s simple but meaningful observations of his surroundings and to provide a feeling for just what happens inside his head. An example of this language would be the immanent usage of “then.” Starting paragraphs with “Then this and this” and also every time someone says something “Then he said:” is very useful in showing how Christopher is dependent on systems and such, and doesn’t really think very differently of the world; rather he categorises the events and list them systematically. This contributes to that same feeling Erlend Loe, my preferred Norwegian author, invokes with the protagonist of Naiv.Super. (Naïve.Super. in English).

I can safely suggest this book as a good book to read; however I would suggest to take it in smaller portions than the whole at once. At least I found this to be a bit tiring, and I found myself getting aggravated by Christopher in the end, because of his different schemes and ways. It is easy reading, very easy indeed, and being captivating as described above, I found it hard to put down. With this said I must also add that I found it simply quite enjoyable to read, and do believe all people with some sort of heart will also be moved by Christopher’s story.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

Pages: 514
Language: English
Nationality: American
First published: 2006

About Blue van Meer and her father, Gareth; they travel around America where Gareth works at numerous institutions, while Blue goes to school at a new place every minute, it seems. Blue is extremely clever, her father the same, he writes and reads, she mostly reads. They settle in Stockton at the end of the book, and Blue gets a teacher that fascinates her more and more, until the teacher commits suicide. Entailing the suicide, Blue aspires to reveal the causes of her death, suicide or not.

I must say, I have never felt as good after finishing a book as I did after Pessl’s first novel. Usually I’d say something to this effect after reading Dante’s Inferno or Shakespeare’s Othello; works that crave something from their reader, and in return give a most rewarding literary adventure, both pleasing and satisfying. With Pessl, however, I just felt happy. Happy it was finally over.

By some dubbed a page-turner, by others named a clever masterpiece, I beg to differ. The 300 first pages could easily have been omitted, they say nothing, except the facts made relevant by the author herself. Upon picking up the novel in the book shop I was told it would be “A page-turning murder mystery … unputdownable” (The Guardian). From this it seems to me that the people at The Guardian only read the last 150 or so pages, as the teacher “She found [...] dead – hanging by a piece of electrical cord.” (off the back cover, Penguin 2007) failed to be found so before page 336 out of 514.

Apart from being astonishingly long without content, it portrays the author’s persona very well. It is clear Pessl feels she has something to show off, not only from the choices of characters, but also from her language, striving to be clever, rich and eloquent, perhaps like Dickens. Instead she stumbles and falls in between all the words and the entire work is out of touch with it’s attempted aptitude.

I would like to make a recommendation concerning this book. You mustn’t read it. Hopefully Pessl will write something far more fetching in the future, which I am sure will make people, until then unfamiliar with Pessl, happy. I, however, won’t ever touch her work again. The reasons are simple: I was told by numerous, multilingual reviews that this was the most fascinating book of the modern world, it’s clever, original and everything else one can wish for in a book. Lies, lies, lies.