Tristessa by Jack Kerouac

Tristessa Reviews

• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  Tristessa is one of Kerouac's supposedly "minor" books but unlike many others it is focused, short (at 96 pages) and is the story of Tristessa, a younger girl and junkie he loves (in a Buddhist way? tragically, unrequited?) from a distance, in Mexico, drunkenly. Has close observations of local scenes and her are vivid, desolate, and filled with "gone," romantic and lyrical detail.
  
  Tristessa is, like so many of Kerouac's "lost" and "beat" heroines lovely, lost, inaccessible, romantic, tragic and of course I fell for her, too, as he wants all of us to. My reading of the book was part of my return to see if Kerouac was as great as I found him from ages 19-24 and this one holds up.
• 
  Meike

  This slim novella is a true gem in Kerouac's canon, it's elegiac and lyrical and absolutely captivating: Set in Mexico, Kerouac's autofictional version falls in love with a heroin-addicted prostitute whose real name was Esperanza (hope), but in the book, she appears as the title-giving Tristessa (triste = sad). Jack, our narrator, is an alcoholic (an addiction that would later kill the author), and infused with mind-altering substances as well as driven by a Buddhist/Catholic spiritual quest, Mexico and particularly Tristessa's apartment turn into a dreamscape, or as
  Allen Ginsberg put it: "Tristessa's a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junkie lady."
  
  The book falls into two parts, as Kerouac leaves Tristessa/Esperanza and travels back to the States to spend some time at
  Desolation Peak (see:
  Desolation Angels and
  The Dharma Bums). When he comes back, Tristessa's addiction has become worse, she is dissociative and even collapses. What's particularly interesting here is how the novella can be perceived: Kerouac writing a beautiful, melancholic novel about a woman who is ostracized by society - a drug-addicted, poor, Mexican prostitute -, in fact making that very woman a tragic heroine, was a revolutionary move and a typical Beat feat: Highlighting people who live on the margins of society and giving them dignity, even elevating them to holy figures (Tristessa becomes some kind of a mater dolorosa).
  
  On the other hand, contemporary readers will also see Tristessa as a version of the tragic woman, as a woman framed through the male gaze, as a projection surface, as a woman whose agency remains in doubt. And both ways to read this text (keep in mind: It was published in 1960!) are valid and important to comprehend and discuss it. In this context, it's striking that Kerouac, while giving the story a quasi-religious, mythical patina, still has a keen eye for Tristessa's self-destructive nature, but not so much for his own nearing demise, which, reading the book, seems blatantly apparent, and which will ultimately destroy him in a slow, gruesome manner (just consult the amazing Anne Charters:
  Kerouac: A Biography).
  
  Clearly one of Kerouac's best works.
• 
  7jane

  This is a novella of a story set in the mid-1950s Mexico City, where Jack has met a prostitute and drug addict named Tristessa (real name: Esperanza Villanueva), who he sees as either indigenous or a mestiza. She is the object of his love for a time: there's a year-long break in the middle, where it seems the events of "Dharma Bums" could've happened - and Jack makes a mistake of not declaring his feelings of love to her which I feel is part of her decline in the later book, but since we're looking from Jack's POV, we can't tell exactly what she thought ot it.
  
  Jack tells his story in a rambling way, mixing in elements of memories of his past life, his beliefs influenced by Buddhism, much angsting which was part of his depressions. Elements of life pass by - walk in the rain, animals inside the house (including one reddish, skinny kitten), Tristessa's great picture of Virgin Mary, the dirt everywhere, eating a lot while walking home, seeing a Pan Am aeroplane in the sky - back then too expensive for people like Jack, I guess.
  
  Jack is a drinker (which leads to his death years later), though he doesn't refuse the occasional drug. Not so for Tristessa, who like her colleague Cruz, and male friends El Indio (with family across town) and Bull Gaines (an old experienced, trust-fund addict who is *not* William S. Burroughs but a friend-of). The drug life in Mexico is not yet so violent as it is these days, but sure, there are shooting dens already; it's still somewhat safe to walk around in the middle of the night (though you can get still robbed of money, but Jack's already drinking then so it doesn' t matter to to him).
  
  Jack is such a man, I feel. If he wasn't feeling such like a rambling, poetic angster with a little case of being 'proper' with sex, would he have been able to tell Tristessa what he really felt about her (and perhaps made her his third wife)? In any case, by the time he comes back to Mexico City, Tristessa is already on the down road in her addiction, with pill-rage and occasional fall-down seizures, which leave Jack in slight panic and with bloodstains on his jeans. He can't help or reach her now - Bull kind of promises to marry her, but perhaps it's mere addict-to-addict sympathy.
  And Jack eventually returns back to US. We can picture what happens to her... and Jack's own addiction does what is does to eventually kill him.
  
  This is a both beautiful and melancholy piece, where the author's feeling are pretty close and clear to us to see, yet I do feel that I would've liked to her more from Tristessa, what she understood and what her opinions were. I think it was good that it was a novella, for this length is good for the mood, and the story is quickly told. It's a picture of a city's past, too, and what drug culture was at that point - quite different now.
  Jack was such a man, yet this is a word painting of Tristessa, and one thinks: what could have been!
• 
  Steven Godin

  "Poor Tristessa is swaying there explaining all her
  troubles, how she hasn't got enough money, she's
  sick, she'll be sick in the morning and in the look
  of her eye I caught perhaps the gesture of a shadow
  of acceptance of the idea of me as a lover"
  
  
  This a story about junk. And its one of the most truthful, painful, but at the same time saintly and beautiful pieces of writing I've come across by Kerouac so far. I've not always got on with his style, and would say its been embarrassingly sloppy in other books, but not here. The substance of the narrative deals with description of hallucinations, morphine sickness, riding around in cabs, street observations, and people who have seemingly given up on life.
  
  The more I read of Kerouac now the more I'm starting to like him. And this coming after I read 'On The Road' a few years ago, didn't like it, and said I'd never read him again. Glad I changed my mind.
• 
  robin friedman

  Tristessa
  
  Many readers who love Kerouac consider "Tristessa" one of his finest novels. "Tristessa" has become the book of Kerouac that I return to most often. The book was initially rejected for publication, and it first appeared in paperback in 1960 following the success of "On the Road". The book initially may have been conceived as part of "On the Road." "Tristessa" is written in Kerouac's "spontaneous prose" style, with long rhythmic improvisational sentences and the feel of jazz. It is short, but deceptively complex, introspective, romantic, and sad. When I first read the book, I was taken by the descriptive passages and didn't pay much attention to the progression of the story. In my most recent reading, I got more from the story itself.
  
  "Tristessa" consists of two short parts, each of which tells the story of the first-person narrator, Jack, as he makes two visits to Mexico City separated by about a year. Jack is in love with Tristessa, a morphine-ridden prostitute. Part 1 of the book, "Trembling and Chaste" develops the ambiguous relationship between Jack and Tristessa. The reader meets Tristessa in her shabby room, surrounded by other addicts, including her supplier, a man named El Indio, and by cats, dogs, chickens,and by a crucifix over her bed. Jack is with her, but he leaves and takes the reader on a tour through the underside of Mexico City, rife with poverty, drugs, and prostitutes. The scenes with Tristessa are interlaced with discussions of suffering, religion and Buddhism. Jack is in love with Tristessa, but he has taken a vow of sexual chastity which he reluctantly tries to honor. Tristessa appears to be in love with Jack.
  
  In the year that intervenes between the two parts of the novel, Jack works in a fire tower in the Northwest -- this story is told in Kerouac's "Desolation Angels" When he returns to Mexico City as narrated in part 2 of the book, Tristessa's life has deteriorated as she has become more hopelessly addicted. Kerouac's friend Old Bull Gaines is also in love with Tristessa as is her supplier of drugs, El Indio. Jack tries to rescue Tristessa from injury,overdose and possible death as he stays with her through the streets of Mexico City and tries to find her a home. He loses her to Gaines and realizes the impossibility of their relationship -- which, in the published text, remains unconsummated. At the close of the book, Jack dreams of writing "long sad tales about people in the legend of my life... This part is my part of the movie". And he invites the reader "let's hear yours."
  
  "Tristessa" is a short, highly personal, and deeply moving novel. Kerouac told the story of his own troubled life in a series of novels that have stayed with me. Every person has their own story, albeit not necessarily that of the beats. Kerouac has told his, and he has challenged the reader to understand and to respond with sympathy and joy to his or her own story: "lets hear yours."
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Evan

  Tristessa, you wily little book flighty as a cat, I should practice Satyagraha and resist my sinister urges to hoo haa your ever-loving Holy graces and wonder in the traces of your manna, all manna of manna, all eat-table and unbeatable and good and thirst-slaking, forsaking my faculties and reveling in the alacrity of all things, like you Mr. K., chronicler of the haloed hollowed hollow-cheeked hollerers of Holiness.
  
  Kerouac, you sing-song like sacred ping-pong, rhythmically and hymnally and hip hoppily in your cadences, and it sometimes seems like an incandescent incantation; an overpowering poetry of the putrid, you leap across chasms to bridge the spasms and orgasms of the morphine-morphed organisms into the divine om of the universally om-less. Your angels are skeletal and vomitous and not long for terra firma; they are lambs enamored of the calamitous; sheep leading themselves into deep revelries, seizing the moments of temporal and eternal sleep, deep dreamers pixellated and driven by ritual fixes.
  
  Or not.
  
  All right, pardon the Kerouac-i-ness; the Kero-whackiness..
  
  For most of the way I couldn't decide whether it was best to read this book slowly and savor all the words or read it fast the way it was written, since the idea of the narrative is presumably an impressionistic one which requires one to pull back from the painting, eg. Seraut, and not fixate on the individual pixels. I decided on the swift approach partly because, when shorn of its pyrotechnics, there's not much to it all.
  
  I liked Kerouac's On the Road mainly because I felt like it it took me on a journey filled with limitless possibilities, whereas here we have mainly a static claustrophobic milieu occupied by junkies engaging in the mundane. Kerouac’s extolling of virtually everything as wonderful, including he and his friends’ appalling lack of responsibility, struck me as gleefully Whitmanesque in On the Road and thus I was able to enjoy it, but here, I don’t much see the charms of Tristessa or her self-destructive coterie, nor would any sober person. I sometimes think it takes an alcoholic and a junkie to see the romanticism in alcoholics and junkies. Otherwise I would tend to tell them to get the fuck out of my house, which is something I have done before.
  
  It's debatable as a piece of poetic prose and sorely lacking as a piece of on-the-ground reportage, mainly codifying the usual stereotypes about Mexico.
  
  And he walks in the rain a lot.
• 
  Radioread

  Tristessa hoş, çeviri bir harika.
• 
  Edita

  [...] and the beauty of things must be that they end.
  *
  [...] humanbeings sow their own ground of trouble and stumble over the rocks of their own false erroring imagination, and life is hard.
  *
  [...] the fresh air of the night hits your newborn solitude...
  *
  Trouble is, what would I do with her once I’d won her?—it’s like winning an angel in hell and you are then entitled to go down with her to where it’s worse or maybe there’ll be light, some, down there, maybe it’s me’s crazy—
• 
  Σωτήρης Καραγιάννης

  Η Τριστέσσα είναι μία μελαγχολική νουβέλα, γραμμένη από τον Τζακ Κέρουακ, τον εκπρόσωπο της γενιάς των Μπητ. Είναι η πρώτη μου επαφή με το έργο του και μπορώ να πω ότι νιώθω κάτι παραπάνω από ευχαριστημένος. Η γραφή του είναι ιδιαίτερη και μου θύμισε αρκετά τις ιστορίες και τα πεζά ποιήματα του Μπωτλαίρ. Καταφέρνει να πλάσει όμορφες εικόνες μέσα στην ασχήμια των πιο βρομερών δρόμων του Μέξικο Σίτι, μπερδεύοντας βιωματικά γεγονότα με τη μυθοπλασία.
  
  Σαν ένας εκπρόσωπος του περιθωρίου, όπως ο Μπουκόφσκι και παλιότερα ο Μπωτλαίρ, καταφέρνει να αποτυπώσει ζωντανά τα συναισθήματα των λούμπεν στοιχείων του Μέξικο, μίας πόλης που αργοπεθαίνει κάτω από τον ίσκιο του Αμερικανικού ονείρου. Εκεί, ο πρωταγωνιστής / Κέρουακ, θα γνωρίσει την Τριστέσσα, μία νεαρή τοξικομανής πόρνη και θα την ερωτευτεί παράφορα. Αυτός όντας αλκοολικός θα μοιραστεί μαζί της τον εθισμό του και θα προσπαθήσει να απεγκλωβιστεί από τα δίχτυα των καταχρήσεων. Ο αφηγητής περιγράφει τα συναισθήματα που νιώθει για την Τριστέσσα με άκρως ποιητικό τρόπο, μπλέκοντας εικόνες από όλες τις θρησκείες, από τη φύση, από την πόλη. Από τα πάντα. Και αυτό είναι που με έκανε να θέλω να διαβάσω περισσότερο Κέρουακ, η ικανότητα να διατυπώνει εικόνες με έναν "αντισυμβατικό" τρόπο που κινούνται άναρχα, δίχως να ακολουθούν κάποια δομή. Είναι οι εικόνες που μιλούν διαφορετικά στον καθένα, ανάλογα με το πόσο κοντά, μακριά ή αποστασιοποιημένα "βλέπει" τα πράγματα που διαβάζει.
  
  Οι σκληρές εικόνες στα δωμάτια που οι ναρκομανείς παίρνουν την δόση τους μπορεί να είναι σκληρές για μερικούς, αλλά η νουβέλα δεν μένει εκεί. Υπάρχουν μικρά ψήγματα αισιοδοξίας μέσα στη μαυρίλα. Ο αφηγητής ανακαλύπτει μία άλλη ομορφιά πέρα από τις καταχρήσεις, το ίδιο αυτοκαταστροφική και λυτρωτική. Την ομορφιά του να ζεις και του να αγαπάς.
• 
  Matthew Ted

  Better and more lyrical than the last Kerouac I read, his 'Satori in Paris'. A short novel about Kerouac in Mexico City, in love with a morphine addict called Tristessa. What a life he had. Some good, classic, Kerouac prose too. I have a library copy so I couldn't underline things so here's just one quote which I remembered from page 18.
  
  'rosy golden angel of my days, and I can't touch her, wouldn't dare get up on a chair and trap in her corner and make her leery human teeth-grins trying to impress it to my bloodstained heart- her blood.'
• 
  John

  “Tristessa” is Kerouac’s name for a young prostitute and a morphine addict whose real name was Esperanza Villanueva. In Spanish Tristessa means sadness. The story is set in Mexico in the 1950s. Jack visits Mexico City and falls in love with a drug addicted prostitute. She is I suspect his muse.
  
  He spends a drunken drug addled evening in her home and with her pets and imagines or hallucinates a variety of incidents. He doesn’t tell her he loves her and has a wild walk home in the rain eating way too many tacos. He then returns to the States.
  
  A year later he returns and finds she has deteriorated and ends up getting robbed by a group he befriends. A wild story in which he misses his opportunity.
• 
  Sepehr Omidvaar

  تریستسا، در دل محله فقیرنشین روما روایت می‌شود. وسط قیامت تیغ‌زن‌ها و آشفته‌بازار کارگران جنسی و جماعت معتادانی که تنها کاری که می‌کنند این است که به خودشان تکانی دهند تا تورگی پیدا کنند. کرواک که خود قهرمان داستان است، از دل توصیف این فضای سیاه، شعر عاشقانه خود را برای معشوقی زیبا اما رو به فروپاشی می‌سراید. تریستسای غم‌زده، سرخ‌پوست آزتکی، فروشنده مواد(و مصرف کننده آن) در جهانی مملو از رنج و آشفتگی، سرگردان است و کرواک در تمنای جست‌وجو و رسیدن به شاهزاده خرابات نشین، همپا و همراه او زوال را تجربه می‌کند.
• 
  Aleksandar Šegrt

  motiv zaljubljenosti u kurvu zavisnu od morfijuma mi je bio obećavajući, ali dosta tanko je ovo.
• 
  George Ballin

  What to say about Tristessa? It´s a beautiful book but definately not for everyone. If you are ok with drugs, prostitution and despair this is a book for you. Needlessly to say I am.
• 
  Stuart Ayris

  Tristessa. What a beautiful name - you can't say it aloud wwithout feeling a sense of wonder, a sense of peace, a feeling that things are slowing down in the most perfect of ways. Yet this book (not sure it's a novel as it's not even a hundred pages yet not sure still it's a book as it's more like a film, a faded, dream sodden broken breaking film) is far from wonderous, far from peaceful and if pain is perfection then it's perfect indeed. Tristessa is what it's called and Tristessa is the name of the woman around whom Jack Kerouac bases this shattered piece of brilliance.
  
  So what happens? What's the narrative? I could tell you (briefly) but it's not important. It would be like describing the meal of hungry man when what is really at stake is the unbelievable hunger.
  
  I have to confess that where Jack Kerouac is concerned I'm somewhat narrow-minded. I adore every single word, dictionary-wise and made-up, he ever wrote. Yeah I see that perhaps, particularly in Tristessa more than any other of his works, that he was a voyeur, that he observed the poor and the pained, the destitute and the intoxicated through the eyes of an author rather than the eyes of a buddha helper compassionate man. There are times in Tristessa when I just cringed - this fallen drug-addled angel that just needed medicine and help but Jack just sulks when he thinks she won't let him make love to her. He should take her to the hospital yet he takes her to a bar and glares as she takes in the eyes of others. He wonders at her blood on his coat and thinks nothing of the fact she just walks away other than the fact he wants her in his bed.
  
  Ask The Dust by John Fante is the archetypal novel of the struggling artist who is so wrapped up in his own wonder that he treats others like mere props upon a stage. Tristessa runs it close. In the former there is irony - in Tristessa there is just sadness.
  
  Jack Kerouac, mate. You wrote the most honest stuff I ever read - paranoid, selfish, brutal, magnificent. You made up your own words and you broke yourself to pieces in the process.
  
  As I read Tristessa I just wanted to sneak in and take Jack out of that mad Mexico drug madness freakdom and take him to a park and see the sky and feel breath and open up to the true unchaotic wonder. Tristessa saddened me beyond belief. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It's a snapshot documentary time in the life of a man who in my own weird world will always be more real than the next step. And it will always be to books such as this that I will turn when I am entirely lost. At three bottles of wine for a tenner at the corner shop that is likely to be fairly often...
  
  
• 
  Kevin Adams

  Has always been one of my favorite Kerouac books. Short and well, I guess not sweet but you get what I’m saying. Underrated gem of his oeuvre, in my opinion.
• 
  Rand

  Evidence of a great talent in slow decline, but still a fun read nonetheless. Reminiscent of his shorter works such as
  The Scripture of the Golden Eternity as well as
  Mexico City Poems and
  Pomes All Sizes. Kerouac’s at his painterly best here, portraying both the horrors of opiate dependence and the despondency of life in a country without a strong economic base wholly without commentary. It is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions from this slim novella.
  
  This book’s place within the “DuLouz Legend” is truncated—it occurs within the whole of the time depicted in
  On the Road while beginning after the
  Dharma Bums with its middle beginning after
  Desolation Angels. For those unfamiliar with Jack Kerouac, DuLouz was one of the many alter egos he used in his many pseudo-autobiographical narratives. Also, he was an unrelenting drunk and unabashed & self-avowed misogynist who became instrumental in introducing ideas of Eastern spirituality to the burgeoning counterculture in the West in the latter half of the last century. This particular book is a better place to start than his most famous, On the Road, as it serves as a distillation of the multiple tensions which motivated him as an author and as a human being. It is at turns nihilistic (soul eats soul in the general emptiness) and hyper-aware (Not one of the vast accumulations of conceptions from beginningless time, through the present and into the never ending future, not one of them is graspable) and humble (trying to remember my place and position in eternity) and beautiful (bodies in beds and the beatable surge when you go into your beloved deep and the whole world goes with you).
  
  As a text it is interesting for the sympathetic (yet ultimately tragic) portrayal of the title character, whom the narrator steadfastly resists the urge to take to bed throughout the course of the narrative—a more urgent need to transcend previous instances concupiscence is at times cited though there is no sustained discussion of this. From the exposition, the narrator views Tristessa as symbol of every woman he’s ever harbored lust for and seeks to “save” her by enabling her drug habit; all while recognizing that her habit (which in time becomes his as well, briefly supplanting his alcoholism) is not sustainable but just her way of overcoming the pain which she endured by virtue of being a beautiful young woman in an economically impoverished patriarchal society. For those not in touch with their Latin roots, the word tristesse means only the most super-emo brand of the sads.
  
  The edition I read was put out by McGraw Hill, the same publisher who did many of the textbooks I read as a wee one. *tee-hee*
  
  A short time after purchasing this particular title, used, I started reading it one evening, entranced. My father walked into the room and interrupted my session, asking me what I was reading. I did not often share my reading with him as he often was not interested—and in the case of this particular book, I knew that he simply would not approve of its stark depictions of drug use; my adolescent predilection for Beat Literature was not something that he ever really understood or encouraged, so it was something that I would read in secret, furtively. As he entered my room I tried to engage him in the events of his day and week, not wishing to highlight the fact that I was just now obviously reading a book prior to his entry. He did not care to discuss him or his life, insistent upon asking me what I was reading. I told him Just one of those Kerouac books and he asked which one, so I showed him. Quickly his mirth turned to outrage as he quoted a random bit about morphine withdrawal. Not quite prepared to defend my reading choice, I stammered that I had not gotten to that part yet. He sneered and said that I would not and began to turn, book still in hand. After convincing him that I would only seek out the book from the public library should he choose to remove it from my keep—like any true book junkie— he returned the book without a word. Confused, I promised to discuss it with him upon finishing it. He smiled and began to turn away, saying he was now very very very tired. I assured him that I would discuss it with him after finishing and he shrugged. Then I offered an assurance not to become an opiate addict and he turned back and then turned away, saying nothing.
  
  Only the unsayable divine word. Which is not a word but a mystery. At the root of the mystery the separation of one world from another by a sword of light.
• 
  Emily Seaman

  I would actually rate this book a -1. Hated it. Read to page 20 TWICE (it's a 97 page book) and couldn't understand anything that was going on. Something about roosters. Call me crazy, but I require books with punctuation.
• 
  Timb

  i never want to take morphine ever
• 
  Kay

  There’s a frenetic energy unique to the writings of Kerouac and The Beats – it’s chaotic and urgent and it pulls you in, urging you to keep reading. Personally, I like that energy. I like the raw honesty of it, even if it often ends up leading to some troubling places. As was the case with Tristessa. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this novella…but I also often found myself scoffing at Kerouac’s arrogance and pomposity and found his sympathy towards the suffering of those around him to be very performative. But that’s Kerouac, forever casting himself in the role of the passive observer, even as he acknowledges his place in the narrative.
• 
  J.P.

  Jack Kerouac is one of my all-time favorite writers, and a prime reason why I became a writer myself. The man wrote a slew of classic titles. However, Tristessa ain't one of them.
  
  I feel like a heel for saying that, but it's only true. Tristessa is 96 pages of Jack Duluoz (Kerouac) mooning over a broken-down morphine junkie/whore who couldn't give a sh*t less about him. Kerouac compares this woman, who's based on a real-life fling he had down in Mexico City, to everyone from Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly to the Virgin Mary. Honestly? Tristessa spends the book shooting up junk, being stoned on junk, being blacked-out from junk, being sick from junk and wandering the city looking for her next fix. That is, when she's not rooking various men (Jack included) out of money for her next fix, turning tricks to earn money for her next fix and making overblown pronouncements about the cruelty and pointlessness of life in Spanglish. Whatever JK saw in this woman does not translate to the page at all.
  
  And here, the character of Duluoz is a hopeless fall guy for Tristessa. He tags after her like a puppy dog, throwing money at her, guzzling booze, taking the occasional shot of junk himself and hoping for a sexual encounter with Tristessa that never happens. The closest he ever gets is a light peck on the lips---and swoons over that like a schoolboy receiving his very first kiss. I found myself actually getting mad at him for being such a doormat.
  
  And as far as Kerouac's style here? This is JK at his spontaneous-composing, self-indulgent worst. In other books, Kerouac's quicksilver style makes his prose breathe and sing. In Tristessa, he just sounds like a guy who got very high, sat down at the keyboard and promptly forgot everything he learned in junior high school English. At one point, JK actually admits that he's lost his train of thought. Parts of this book, especially toward its end, are pure gibberish. And the book doesn't so much end as simply stop---JK intimates that Duluoz finally gets a clue and decides to head home, abandoning Tristessa to her fate. But this is lost in a slew of yadda-yadda beatnik nonsense. And surprisingly, Kerouac actually uses the term "beatnik" here to describe a brunette junkie girl he spies during one of numerous visits to drug dens. (In the several JK biographies I've read, it was reported that Kerouac hated the word and never used it himself.)
  
  I suppose I can give old Jack points for rendering a vivid picture of the environment in which Tristessa and company live. Kerouac was always a great painter of word-pictures and, at least in that respect, he doesn't disappoint. And if you're looking for a cautionary example of the bleak, empty and pointless lives that junkies lead, you've found it here. But is it worth slogging through a 96-page masturbation dream to get it? I say no.
  
  If you're new to Kerouac, DO NOT START HERE. Try On The Road, The Dharma Bums or his true masterpiece, Big Sur. JK's penultimate effort, Satori in Paris, and his final novel, Vanity of Duluoz, are also vibrant books which are well worth the time and effort.
  
  If you're a Kerouac completist, then fix yourself some strong coffee, put Charlie Parker on your stereo and dive in to Tristessa. But don't expect much. When the best thing about a book is its brevity, that's a problem.
• 
  Joana

  A escrita subversiva de Kerouac prende-me profundamente. Este é um daqueles livros que nos engana, por variados motivos. Apesar da sua finura e de aparentar ser um livro sem grande conteúdo (a escrita subversiva engana-nos neste sentido) é um livro denso e cheio de entrelinhas. Kerouac escreve ao ritmo do tempo, do álcool, das drogas e da tesão e, por isso, é sempre tudo tão rápido, tão efusivo, tão fragmentário - afinal não é a vida assim mesmo?
  
  Uma bela introdução a um dos grandes da Beat Generation que me fez ficar a ansiar por mais.
  
  "We are nothing.
  - Tomorrow we may be die.
  We are nothing.
  - You and me."
• 
  Harish

  This is maybe a little more rambling/unstructured than usual for Kerouac (!), but overall, it's quintessential kerouacian stream-of-consciousness prose that's worth a read for when he finally hits his stride mid-book.
  
  "since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of."
• 
  Benjamin

  I myself can barely tolerate the writing of Kerouac. Too many run on sentences and drug addled thought processes. It's not that I absolutely hate it, but I think much of his popularity is based on name only without any regard to the finer details of his chaotic and exhausting prose. I feel as if I'm giving this a generous rating, based solely on the rare parts I actually happened to enjoy, while much of it was wasted effort to me. It was, and is, mainly an exercise of patience.
• 
  Mel

  Tristessa was breath-takingly gorgeous! I realised half way through he'd just been sitting in a junkie's room in Mexico City (with Burroughs) and it had been fascinating! It was so beautifully written, and touching and sad and everything that I love best about Kerouac.
• 
  Leonardo

  Como un poema de 96 páginas. La manera de Jack de describir unos cuantos días de su vida es impresionante. El primer libro que leo de él y creo que buscaré alguno más.
  No recomendaría 'Tristessa' para lectores que no les agrada que describan a su país en este caso México de la peor manera posible, aunque se trate de la triste realidad en esos años y el ambiente donde él se desenvolvía, yo me preguntaría si ¿ha cambiado en la actualidad?
  
  Me dejó pensando ¿Qué sentía Jack por Tristessa ? amor, odio, lástima? Y ¿Qué sentía ella por el? Nada?
  
  
  "Quería iluminarse, conquistar el nirvana, pagar sus deudas con su karma y zambullirse en una eternidad de a de veras"
  
  "¿Por qué tenemos que pecar y persignarnos?"
• 
  Manochehr.Zare

  ترجمه رزازیان خوب بود
  منتها یه ایراد اساسی به رمان هست و اون خود نویسنده ست :)))
  درواقع اگه سبک کرواک به مخاطب نسازه نمیتونه ادامه بده
  جدای از سبک موضوع ایده مطرحه که خیلی هم ناب نیست
  موضوع شخصیت پردازی و از اون مهم تر تحول شخصیت ها کامل نشده اما سه ستاره میگیره چون هر دو مورد رو تا حد زیادی رعایت کرده
• 
  Sarah

  I really did not like this narration style. If this is an example of Kerouac's work I'm really not interested in reading more.
• 
  sarah

  At first I thought some of the books themes was the male gaze and mystification/romanticisation of a non-white country but after reading on and looking at other reviews i think that is not the case
  
  I feel it is less a critique and more an unintentional case study
  
  despite that it is obviously very well written and had beautiful prose as well as it being written in beat which i love
• 
  Mindaugas Mozūras

  Couldn't finish. The writing style of Jack Kerouac is not for me.