The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac

The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Just goes on and on about an American family – getting tiresome at times - echoes of his better known On the Road.
Nothing like the classic A Tale of Two Cities or the para-dimensional The City & the City.
There is an occasional flash of brilliance

…drinking a coke at the corner drugstore in absorbed melancholy, but all the time he is balancing life and death, stumbling through a thousand moods of horror and hate, watching himself step discreetly through all the philosophies, sects, factions and cults of a hundred books, living the despondencies of many heroes – Jean Valjean, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, Anna Karenina, Greta Garbo, Byron, Tristan, Hedda Gabler.

Then, as the sun came up in full brilliant array far off over the hills, fanning light all over the sky and gilding little dawn-clouds that were regimented beautifully overhead, the boys fell silent, in awe, and stood on the two hills watching…

Thus spake Doc Daneeka to Yossarian

Like you say they’d have to prove you’re nuts for not wanting to fight their silly wars. Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Getting back to Jack Kerouac from Joseph Heller

It’s the great molecular comedown. It’s really an atomic disease. It’s death finally reclaiming life, the scurvy of the soul at last, a kind of universal cancer. It’s got a real medieval ghastliness, like the plague, only this time it will ruin everything.

I said to myself, cockroaches are human too, just as much as us human beings. Reason for that is this: I’ve watched them long enough to realize their sense of discretion, their feelings, their emotions, their thoughts, see.

‘Oh him? He’s a disgruntled Chicagoan who loves Bach, spaghetti, Cris-craft cruises, tubercular women, and pains at Carmel in the summer.’

He was that all struggles of life were incessant, labourious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labour, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings – all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavour.

One needs a lot of patience to complete the book.

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