Tristessa

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.“[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 Review 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.