A review by jentang
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

2.5

Disgusting, nonsensical, utterly pointless - that's Naked Lunch. If you gave A Clockwork Orange a hard time for having its own language, just wait until you crack open this sucker! The words in this book are strung together in an entirely seizure-like manner; you may almost begin to understand, but you will lose all comprehension mid-sentence, albeit to no fault of your own. While Burroughs certainly used a great deal of drug-fueled creativity to write in such a scrambled, fractured manner, it was wholly disappointing to see there was no extension of this originality into the topics themselves which he wrote about. Of what was intelligible from the taboo matters Burroughs touched on, I felt most were written in a quite juvenile fashion. Ideas were repeated excessively; one squirm-inducing subject having to do with bodily functions would sprawl irritatingly on for multiple consecutive pages on top of being woven through the entire book. I almost quit a fourth of the way through, failing to see how revolutionary this novel was (there was only one brief section almost 200 pages in IIRC that I actually found amusing and pertinent to culture + society), and I don't believe that my feelings would have been generally different if I had. I was fond of the author's notes and whatnot that came at the very end of the restored text; while swiftly running readers through something akin to a drug index, Burroughs demonstrated actual normalcy, and a flair that I recognize in Infinite Jest as well. Had this flair been recognizable within the book itself, I suspect I may have joined the literary critics in calling this a masterpiece. A pity