Queer
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In una sterminata suburra, che Burroughs avrebbe poi definito «Interzona», e che qui va da Città del Messico, capitale mondiale del delitto («il cielo di quella speciale sfumatura d’azzurro che si intona tanto bene con gli avvoltoi volteggianti»), a Panama, Lee, alter ego dello scrittore, tesse la sua amorosa tela intorno a Allerton, un giovane ambiguo, indifferente come un animale. Si aggira in locali sempre più sordidi, bazzicati da una fauna putrescente, e così divagando, picaro alieno, ci regala schegge del suo nerissimo humour. Con questo romanzo, che risale agli inizi degli anni Cinquanta – e che viene qui presentato in una nuova edizione condotta sui manoscritti originali –, affiora per la prima volta il paesaggio allucinato che oggi ormai porta il nome di Burroughs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an introduction, Burroughs observes that he wrote this heretofore unpublished picaresque novel in 1951, well before Naked Lunch established his reputation. He reveals that the book had its genesis in a terrible event: his accidental shooting to death of his wife, Joan, a tragedy that released the black wellsprings of his talent. The narrative recounts the hallucinatory life of William Lee, an American in Mexico City in the 1940s and his journey to Ecuador with his reluctant lover, Eugene Allerton, in search of the drug Yage. Lee is Burroughs after the killing, weighed down by guilt, drugs, lust and despair; seeking lethe. Admirerers will find an early exposition of Burroughs's later themes here, as well as a strain of gallows humor. The work is almost cinematic as it unfolds; the author is not yet experimenting with the meaninglessness of language, and, indeed it is thin in both thought and expression. This is the first of a series of Burroughs's works to be issued by Viking. Foreign rights: Andrew Wylie Agency. November
