Tristessa

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Tristessa is a novel by Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac and was first published in 1960. The German first edition appeared in 1965.

The book, which is rather narrow by Kerouac's standards, addresses two of his visits to Mexico in the early 1950s. His descriptions of the prostitute Tristessa, her dirty little apartment and the individuals frequenting it are almost meditative; of the morphinist El Indio, a hen, a rooster, a Chihuahua, a cat and a pigeon. And like a dream walker, Jack also moves through this world, which he does not understand, but reproduces through his own thinking, which is clouded with Buddhist views and partly by Pot .

When he returns a year later, the once beautiful tristessa is only a shadow of herself. The drug has taken its toll, and Jack, who indulges in drugs with Old Bull Gaines, can take on the image of the ultimately pure and godly Tristessa no longer sustained. After all, she's just an ordinary whore who has to satisfy her drug addiction. Like himself she is a prisoner of her own loneliness and isolation.

Kerouac describes the Mexico of his time in dreamlike and poetic images. Associations meet puns and deliberations that are clearly shaped by pot consumption.

literature