mkmatheson 's review for:

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

4.0

medium-paced

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Naked Lunch may be the most explicit book I’ll ever read, but it isn’t crass. (As Burroughs writes on writing about addiction, “[the book] is necessarily brutal, obscene, and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomachs.”) Naked Lunch is exemplative of beatnik counterculture, not just in its unrestricted sense of acceptability, but in its unrestricted sense of structure; reading this is an untethered experience, much like addiction. What makes this all the more shocking is how funny the book can be in its absurd—and I mean ABSURD—satire. Naked Lunch isn’t for everyone, I don’t even think it’s for most people, but it’s wholly its own.