Naked Lunch - William Burroughs

It was certainly a nightmare to wade through this convoluted pile of literary excrement. I hated every page of it. I also loathe the Beat movement and all it stands for, along with its trio of narcissistic helmsmen. I won't grace this odious brain splurge with a proper, analytical review because it simply does not deserve more of my time. Naked Lunch is a delinquent, immature, pseudo-intellectual piece of racist, sexist writing of a drug crazed addict who thought he belonged to a pioneering and progressive arts movement when in reality they were a band of spineless, talentless, squandering wastrels who smoke and drank too much and wrote very little of lasting merit. There is no plot to mention, so lets move onto some more criticism.

Bill Burroughs, the self styled 'genius' of this hallucinatory garbage was a long time addict of every hard drug then available and much of his prose was constructed whilst under the influence. It's the sort of book that appeals to hipsters and far left substance abusers. The foul profanities, graphic homosexual pornographic content, and cartoonish, heavy handed political satire also guarantees an academic audience so they can have merry sessions discussing it in terms of queer theory and shattered American frontiers. The tired and much overdone collapse of the American dream will never get old to the armchair socialist wimps who make it their career to make knowing nods to dystopian realities. It's a shame that Naked Lunch received such a rabid cult following as there are far better books on drug abuse and experimentalism out there.

Rating: 1/5