If you are unfamiliar with the open consciousness style of Beat poet Jack Kerouac, this might be a challenging read. There is a unique rhythm, and certainly the underground scene of drinking and heavy drugs may not be for everyone. This is an autobiographical novel of a love affair set in the slums of Mexico City, 1960.
This story is open structure, beginning with Jack and Tristessa drunkenly drinking from the bottle in a taxi on a rainy Saturday night, reeling past side streets and the Cine Mexico, heading to Tristessa's house where "El Indio will be there standing majestically with morphine needle downward in the big brown arm, glitter-eyed looking right at you or expecting the prick of the needle to bring the wanted flame itself...the Aztec needle in my flesh of flame."
Tristessa is a Mexican prostitute and junkie, at 16 she had been an addict. They sleep through the days and wander the night markets or hang around slum apartments, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, with the hen gently pecking the floor, and the little cat a mass of fleas, drinking mescal, tequila, sharing beds or sleeping on the floor, Tristessa in her kimono, lighting devotional candles under the ikons, with narrative adoration to Buddha, wandering the night streets in pairs, on another dismal rainy night where it seems it is always 2 AM, past the whores and pickpockets, the dark Plaza Garibaldi filled with gangs, and gangs of semi-hipsters, Juarez and the Palace of Fine Arts, until 4:30 AM when you are up boiling down a couple of capsules of morphine in a spoon, and laying back to sleep.
"I wish I could communicate to all their combined fears of death the teaching that I have heard from Ages of Old, that recompenses all that pain with soft reward of perfect silent love abiding up and down and in and out everywhere, past, present, and future in the Void unknown where nothing happens and simply it is what it is...but they know that themselves, beast and jackal and love woman...so old they've heard it long ago before my time."
Kerouac writes of Tristessa with love, without judgement. This is a challenging read, but masterful in its style, reminding me of John Rechy's Last Exit To Brooklyn. There is really no one like him. Whether this is a past recollection, a fantasy, or an autobiography written at the time, and whether you enjoy his style or not, his work is unique and admirable.
For fans of the Beat poets, counter-culture, and junkie whores.
1960 / Tradeback / 96 pages
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