Leile's review
Cities of the Red Night: A Novel by William S. Burroughs
Eh, definitely a great premise, but I feel like old Bill Burroughs just doesn't pull it off this time around. Really in the end, the whole thing just seems like a mess. Don't get me wrong -- I don't have a problem with the fact that there is a non-linear storyline, or that almost all of the characters are homosexual drug addicts. It's just that all of those elements are also at the forefront of the second novel of the same trilogy (Place of the Dead Roads), and that instance I feels like he succeeds remarkably in a similarly ambitious experiment.
Still, there is some great writing here...Burroughs is naturally talented enough to just blow you away with even the most fragmented ideas and passages. I think if this novel were arranged differently, and had some stuff added and subtracted, we might really have a great work on our hands. It is perhaps worth reading just to see on paper Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's theory on the origins of the white race (that it was an albino hybrid race ...more
Still, there is some great writing here...Burroughs is naturally talented enough to just blow you away with even the most fragmented ideas and passages. I think if this novel were arranged differently, and had some stuff added and subtracted, we might really have a great work on our hands. It is perhaps worth reading just to see on paper Burroughs' and Brion Gysin's theory on the origins of the white race (that it was an albino hybrid race ...more
I have a hard time finding _any_ Burroughs which does not have healthy doses of non-linear storyline and homosexual drug addicts. =] So the post-modernist keeps telling the story, what else is new?
But don't you feel like he pulls it off way better in the next installment in the trilogy? To me "Cities" is like a stepping stone: a noble experiment that ultimately doesn't produce the desired results, but which sets the stage for a glorious new breakthrough in literary science and human thought which occurs a few years later...in "Place of the Dead Roads".
To be fair, this book really deserves more than two stars, as does any Burroughs text, but I guess I'm judging it against some of his other writing. Plus I liked the premise and a lot of the writing in "Cities" so much...I guess I just wish it could have come together more harmoniously. But that's missing the point, I know. I think I'll give it another look.
True; "Dead Roads" is more cohesive (with an equally engaging premise), but I saw the roads-to-nowhere in "Cities" as an occluding tissue set to be ripped away in the ending/revolution. "Cities" brings an image to my mind: Tolkien, if he set up his trilogy, and then spoke only of the memes, character types, and most immediate actions when the final battle came about; Burroughs being v. self referential.
...here, I'll give "Dead Roads" another look--like I need an excuse--and keep my eyes open for new ways to look at the trilogy =]
