Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)

Another book I was led to by an adaptation (David Cronenberg's film). This time, the source material turned out to be utterly different. Not that it was a case of the movie making a lamentable butchery of the book, which is so often the case. It's just that the book is sort of unfilmable, at least it would be impossible to make a satisfying film adaptation of the book and not have it banned worldwide. That's how these things are. You can't show everything on film that you can write about. In any case, the film was a very interesting Cronenberg piece, and the book was something else...my first Burroughs experience, and every bit as rich and exciting as it was confusing and frustrating. It's just insane. And it's brilliant, but I found the frustrating part to be that I felt it could have been planned better and made more sense. Not that art is necessarily meant to make sense, but there comes a point when drug induced hallucinations and descriptions of boys ejaculating, all with little or no sense of plot to ground them in the reader's mind, become tiresome. This book is filled with extreme, bizarre humor, and just running over with material for a potential "Burroughs on life" quotation book. However, not the kind of thing you'd find being sold at the front counter on the little gift book rack, unfortunately. In the end, Naked Lunch is disgusting, chaotic, surreal, funny, and beautiful. It is horrific porno-satire-poetry that you will want (or need) to read more than once.