Tristessa

<b>Based on Jack Kerouac's real-life love affair in Mexico City this novel follows a man's doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.</b><br><b> </b><br><b>[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.--<i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b> <p/>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. <p/>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.