Tristessa

Tristessa - the way it rolls down your tongue like a hiss, escaping like a slow death, is reminiscent of Kerouac's muse from Mexico. A long-time junky, dead eyes, dead love, dancing her way to ruins, untouchable.

One takes from this book the difficult but obvious truth, lessons greater than unrequited love. To fall in love with a junky is to step into a black hole. To live with a junky, one must become a junky. So all throughout this thing we have Jack tiptoeing around and against the void with his bottle of alcohol and notebook of poems, taking us through dizzying streets of men and women in rags, dead animals in ditches, morphine shooters in dark alleys and beloved Tristessa - sick without a shot, sick with goofballs...

It's a sad, painful, brilliant novella. A good entry to Kerouac's works, if one may ask. He is a true jazz writer, making good use of odd notes in language and still have it come out as music. Not many can achieve that. He is to be read in rhythm. In this book, Kerouac writes an ode to lost things, in the process of losing one. La tristesse durera.