Tristessa

ISBN: 0140168117

Author: Kerouac, Jack

Condition: New

Based on Jack Kerouacs real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a mans doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.[Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race. . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene.-The New York Times Book ReviewThis short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American mans ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams.This elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young womans pain and suffering.