William Burroughs
Naked Lunch

"..smelling of sperm and pussy and sweat and the closed-room smell of the rectum during penetration.."

This is a sentence found when randomly opening one of the 273 pages of the book I'm about to review. On any given page, you will certainly find a scene, an action, or a character that seems to have come out of an acid trip preserved from the '50s until today.

This is undoubtedly the most depraved work in all the literature concerning the Beat Generation. However, calling it a book might be an overstatement. In fact, it was written following the track set by the sheets the author, high on who knows what African drugs, had scribbled in the midst of his lysergic journeys. The entire work does not follow a linear and well-defined plot. It almost appears as a jumble of increasingly hallucinogenic situations. Don't even vaguely imagine finding yourself in front of yet another book à la On The Road. While that one can indeed be read as a great book about the youthful rebellion of those fiery years and about freedom in general, still written in a traditional manner (except for the dialogues between the characters where the slang of the time is used), in "Naked Lunch" the unrestrained thought immediately turns into language, without a moment's hesitation, in its freest and least controlled form, giving rise to certain vulgarities that, at least seemingly, have nothing to do with literature. But it is here that the innovation lies. Burroughs, who with this book begins a tetralogy that will include "The Soft Machine", "The Ticket That Exploded", and "Nova Express", immediately puts all his sick thoughts on paper, not sparing us situations that transcend every perversion to such an extent that they make all his contemporary friends/colleagues seem like fervent Christian prudes, trying to connect them to one another in the best possible way.

If we were to draw a profile of this important American novelist, we could only see him as a man who did things just to experiment with them and admire the consequences. And the experimentation of "Naked Lunch", who knows what laughter it must have provoked in his spirit while he observed the faces of his readers/victims disgusted by his obscenities. Just one piece of advice before you venture, if you really want to experience how incredibly impactful certain works can be, to read this book: keep repeating to yourself: "it's all fake, it's all fake, it's all fake..."