Jack Kerouac
I Sotterranei

THE REVIEW

"The Subterraneans" is more than the manifesto of a generational movement: it is its true essence, imprinted on paper with a spontaneous prose that exudes jazz, sex, frenzy, anxiety, and euphoria from every page.

The bohemian spirit of the beatniks narrated by a beatnik (by his own admission, under the influence of benzedrine and in just three days) during the full Beat period: it's easy to see how everything in this novel is real, even when the real becomes rarefied; so real it becomes hard and disturbing, frankly vague, intricate, and light. The transmission of sensations and atmospheres does not rely on descriptions (it may be trivial to say, but it's rare for descriptions to do justice to the purity and truth of certain sensations), but is entrusted to one great stream of consciousness punctuated by accents: it is the "bop prosody", a writing inspired by the rhythms of jazz innovators, attempting to reproduce that alternation of edginess and ideal relaxation for improvisations, which find their counterpart on paper in the long digressions and apparently pointless flights of fancy, but essential to maintain the frenetic rhythm of the prose.

Jazz, late '50s San Francisco, the Subterraneans (a term I spontaneously associate with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" from Dylan's 'hallucinated' period), a group of misfits, including artists of various calibers, all eccentric but united by their inability to stay still (a main theme of On the Road, another masterpiece by Jack Kerouac), by their passion for social life and everything it entails. A real love, that between Leo Percepied (Kerouac's alter ego) and Mardou Fox (an African American girl whose extraliterary identity is uncertain) literally stripped bare in all its development: so bare that it deserved an obscenity trial on its first publication in Italy, only to be acquitted for the "lyrical beauty of some of its images".

It's not a novel 'to be read': to understand it, you have to immerse yourself, get into the right mood, and go through the pages in one breath, with the same spontaneity with which it was written, without stopping. Maybe accompanying it with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis. It's up to you.