On The Road CD | Jack Kerouac | Loved the Reading

On The Road CD | Jack Kerouac | Great performance, great novel

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On The Road CD

	On The Road CD Jack Kerouac Caedmon, 2004 average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty", the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.

Loved the Reading

Matt Dillion was terrific in this reading. I suppose it's a question of
tastes, however. I thought his portrayal of Dean Moriarity was so compelling and very, very funny. I felt I knew the characters after listening to this CD.

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Great performance, great novel

Matt Dillon was an excellent choice for this project. I never tire of this book and I have to say Matt reads this as flawlessly as if he were telling his own story from memory.
His performance is subtle as well as steller. Kerouac's absence from hollywood has made him a sort of conversation pitch, because if you don't know Jack you probably don't read very much.

Perfect presentation!!!

Matt Dillon's presentation was superb -- he brought the characters to life. Especially, Dean, with his slow, distant, unique way of talking ... it was like Dean was really there.

I would very much recommend this audio CD to anyone who likes On the Road. Very, very well done.

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An excellent performance of a childish novel

I dislike the prose Beats; I *hate* Burroughs, while I only dislike Kerouac, but nonetheless I agree with John Updike's very funny parody of the genre called "On The Sidewalk" (from his 1965 book Assorted Prose), in which the narrator is a faux-rebellious child who takes off burning through the afternoon on his tricycle, but is too scared to cross the street alone.

But Matt Dillon's performance of this audiobook version is really excellent. He does absorbing but not overdone voices for the different characters, reads the rest of the time with a suitable world-weary tone, and (my favorite aspect of his performance) picks up on the fact that Kerouac sometimes goes on a tear of short, Hemingway-esque sentences, which Dillon reads as if they were liturgy or poetry, with a steady, incantatory beat.

There seems to be a trend of recruiting name actors to do high-profile audiobooks; Maggie Gyllenhall's The Bell Jar is even better.

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A new audio book lover is born...

On the Road is my very first audio book ever. I've tried audio books in the past, but they always seemed to be narrated by some suave fella with a buttery English accent, and I would inevitably end up face-down on my bed, snoring away within 5-7 minutes of beginning. When I began to commute for a total of 80 minutes a day (round trip), I quickly tired of listening to the same music time and again. Although I have an 8gb iPod nano, you can only cram so much music on the thing. After I gave up finding a decent radio station, I was left with one simple option. Give audio books another try.

On the Road seemed an obvious choice for two reasons. 1) I was turning to audio books because I was "on the road" so much (har har) 2) I haven't been able to read it. That is, its rambling style tends to put me to sleep almost as quickly as a British man reading at me. Yet, I've always wanted to complete it despite my doomed attempts, and the recent publication of Kerouac's original scroll sort of bewitched me. I was completely ignorant of the great Kerouac myth before I decided to listen to this book. I had no idea the length of time that Kerouac and his cronies spent traveling the country. I hadn't the foggiest idea that he wrote the book on one long, uninterrupted scroll of paper (120 feet). Or that Kerouac composed the novel in a three-week rush of writing fueled by endless cups of coffee and--though Kerouac adamantly denied it--probably Benzedrine.

But enough of the back story...let's get to the book! I listened to an unabridged audio version narrated by Matt Dillon, and for that aspect alone, I expected to have problems with it. Matt Dillon is generally considered, by me, a boil on the butt of humanity. His teeth bother me, his face bothers me, his voice bothers me. But, somehow, he was able to make On the Road come alive. Given, he has his readerly flaws--his syllables sometimes smashing in on one another, his characters' voices eventually crapping out and evening into something that sounds very much like "every other character." However, he has some rough wildness to his voice that did justice to Kerouac's musical, rambling, stream-of-consciousness classic.

This is one of those books, like Wuthering Heights, that offers few likable characters. They're ruffians and deadbeats and swindlers, but they're also thinkers and adventurers. I suppose the story, as I knew it would, plays into my romantic fantasies of dropping everything and just taking off. I would love to travel the country with no particular place to be for seven years. Drink with friends, intellectualize, philosophize and write, write, write. Alas, Kerouac lived, in many ways, in a dramatically different America than the one we live in today. A man could hitchhike from coast to coast, sleep around and drive his car into a muddy ditch in middle America without worrying too much about being arrested or getting knifed to death and hacked into little pieces.

I read somewhere that Kerouac's novel is a "love letter to America," and I think that's a fair assessment. He became intimately acquainted with corners of this country that most people will never see, and never care to see. His manic scribblings are interspersed with poetic, literary digressions that boggle the mind. The whole thing is one big jazz solo twittering, banging and hooting all night long.

Now, all these praises don't actually mean that I liked the book that much. That's news, eh? This is one of those tomes that I appreciate even if it bored me at times. I appreciate Kerouac's intentions far more than his prose, and when all is said and done, I really like the mythical proportions that this story and its author have grown into.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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