Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

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Provocative, influential, morbidly fascinating, Naked Lunch is an apocalyptic ride through the darker recesses of the human psyche. The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” In his review for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer". [27] Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review for the Chicago Reader wrote, "David Cronenberg's highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing – even the film about writing". [28] Having inadvertently accomplished his mission, Lee flees to Interzone, located in a city somewhere in North Africa. He spends his time writing reports concerning his mission; these documents, at the insistence of his visiting literary colleagues, are eventually compiled into the titular book. While Lee is addicted to assorted mind-altering substances, his replacement typewriter, a Clark Nova, becomes a talking insect which tells him to find Dr. Benway by seducing Joan Frost, a doppelgänger of his dead wife. There is a row at gunpoint with Joan's husband Tom, after Lee steals his typewriter, which is then destroyed by the Clark Nova insect. Lee also encounters Yves Cloquet, who is apparently an attractive young gay Swiss gentleman. However, Lee later discovers that Yves is merely disguised as a human, and that his true form is a huge monstrous shapeshifting centipede. The novel was included in Time's "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". [3] Title origin [ edit ]

If you've read the book and ever watched a Cronenburg film, you're eyes just bugged out and jaw dropped at the idea of it, right? If not, why not? Explain.

The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs: heroin, morphine and, while in Tangier, majoun (a strong hashish confection), as well as a German opioid with the brand name Eukodol ( oxycodone), of which he wrote frequently. [2] Scholarly research has also suggested Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863 as Burroughs' inspiration for the title. [ citation needed] Political context [ edit ]

Avidar-Walzer, Sand (31 January 2014). "Welcome to Interzone: On William S. Burroughs' Centennial". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 4 July 2023. In that way every work is a part of Naked Lunch. It never ends. And never shall end. That's the nature of art and reality. Which is why this book is so coherent. The novel has been described as "an essentially nihilistic work" [22] and "consistently hostile, contemptuous, forcefully hateful [...] without joy." [23] Robin Lydenberg suggests that the novel advocates "a violent rejection and undermining of the entire dual system of morality." [24]Say hello to Bradley the Buyer, the best narcotics agent in the business. Attend international playboy A.J.'s annual party, where the punch is to be treated with extreme caution. Meet Dr 'Fingers' Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid and his giant centipede, 'The Complete American De-anxietized Man.' And enter the dark and infernal mind of Bill Lee as he pursues his daily quest for the ultimate merchandise...

The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, [8] a complete American edition (by Grove Press) did not follow until 1962. It was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession. [9] The definite article "the" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. [10] Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated. So many people define the world (and most of fiction) through a vague interpretation of Platonic realism. Where everything we accept in the world is a universal truth. And anything that challenges what we accept is heresy. We mistake traditionalism for reality. Isn't that cute? Hemmer, Kurt (2009). " "The natives are getting uppity": Tangier and Naked Lunch". In Harris, Oliver; MacFadyen, Ian (eds.). Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. pp.65–72. ISBN 978-0-8093-2915-1.

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The only other censorship action against the book outside the State of Massachusetts occurred in Los Angeles, where the novel was cleared of obscenity charges at a trial in 1965." Of course, of course. "Everybody who disagrees with me is a madman" is something only a very sane and stable and self-aware person would say. Why it's the height of sanity and rationalism to see oneself as an inherently rational middle ground. Burroughs, William S. (2001). Grauerholtz, James; Miles, Barry (eds.). Naked Lunch (the restored texted.). Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-4018-1. This book also surprised me a bit: it is rare that I like a book with zero relatability to me. I mean, I had no experience whatsoever with any prohibited drugs and still I found this book amazing. It used to be that I would only like books that speak to me. Maybe my literary taste is maturing since I am in my fourth year of voracious reading. Thank you, Goodreads.