BookOpinion

Some quick reading for you from around the world of books this weekend. 

The New York Times looks at the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”:

On the Road Again

In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example…

…Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary…

…Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing … but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby.

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USA Today reviews “Immortalists,” which looks at two of famous 20th century men and the dark side of their shared dream:

‘Immortalists’ exposes Achilles’ heel of two famous figures

Here are two alternative subtitles for David Friedman’s fascinating new book, The Immortalists: “Geniuses Do the Creepiest Things.” Or “Brains Aren’t Everything.”

Friedman’s non-fiction account, in stores Tuesday, describes the long collaboration between American aviator Charles Lindbergh and French scientist Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. It examines the two men’s shared dream: to defeat death and pursue immortality.

This passion would lead Carrel and Lindbergh down the disturbing path of eugenics. They became fixated on the idea of saving the “superior” white race from “inferior” brown people. (The dynamic 21st-century economies of India and China would be a big surprise to these two.) There were also horrifying experiments on animals.

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William Gibson talks with the NPR in an 8-minute podcast:

Science fiction novelist William Gibson has a talent for making the future seem like the present. But his newest book, Spook Country, does the opposite. It follows a half-dozen characters as they chase after the contents of a mysterious container.

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Lastly, J. K. Rowling has been spotted working on a new book, a detective novel:

LONDON - J.K. Rowling has been spotted at cafes in Scotland working on a detective novel, a British newspaper reported Saturday.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling’s, as saying the creator of the “Harry Potter [website]” books is turning to crime fiction.

“My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel,” the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.

“It is great that she has not abandoned writing or Edinburgh cafes,” said Rankin, who is known for his own police novels set in the historic Scottish city.

Rowling famously wrote initial drafts of the Potter story in the Scottish city’s cafes. Back then, she was a struggling single mother who wrote in cafes to save on the heating bill at home.

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