Tristessa - Jack Kerouac

Category: Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Beat Drugs Mexico Novella

Written by Jack Kerouac
Read by Mike Dennis
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

This short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man’s 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 woman’s pain and suffering.

January 25 2016
2 hrs and 14 mins