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American Smoke
La obra de Iain Sinclair es, en cierto modo, la de un detective. Un detector de pistas que, al seguirlas, resuelve misterios. Ocurre con Sinclair, sin embargo, que sus peculiares investigaciones poco tienen que ver con el crimen y mucho con la huella cultural que van dejando sus héroes a lo largo de los siglos. En American Smoke Sinclair abandona el territorio que más conoce, Londres, para desembarcar por primera vez en una zona desconocida: Estados Unidos. Este peculiar libro de viajes relata el encuentro de Sinclair con una vastedad geográfica y cultural inabarcable: de punta a punta del país, de una costa a otra, el autor sale a la busca de nombres esenciales para comprender su prosa, su visión del mundo y su acidez conceptual, de Malcolm Lowry a Jack Kerouac, de Charles Olson a William Burroughs, y de Gary Snyder a toda clase de mitos, paisajes y recuerdos que han moldeado el imaginario colectivo, con particular interés (aunque no exclusivamente) por la Generación Beat y los grandes espacios abiertos de América. Asimismo, Sinclair también busca el fantasma de Roberto Bolaño en Barcelona y en Blanes, o los de Malcolm Lowry o William Burroughs en California. Descrito como un libro de «trayectos errados y decisiones malaventuradas», American Smoke es un road trip alucinógeno que confirma a Iain Sinclair como el paseante definitivo y uno de los cronistas más afilados de las últimas décadas.
384 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
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About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books341 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
September 18, 2019
My rating is reflective of the excitement by which I plowed through this work. Sinclair has been one of my favorites for years and for this nonfiction he elected to take a walk outside of the British Isles. Ostensibly this is about the Black Mountain Poets but as is invariably the case with Sinclair he involves just about everything and this winds up being an account of four trips to the Western hemisphere. Aside from the legacy of Charles Olsen and the Black Mountain school, Sinclair interviews Beats and their descendants, associates and scholars devoted to such. This ripples outward and a fascinating web of associations (Lovecraft, Lowery, Bolaño) and then it became disturbing--to me personally, citing Touch of Evil, the AMC retelling of The Killing and the insomniac vision of Nicolas Winding Refn. My wife and watched the former two weeks ago, she just finishing binging on all the seasons of the Seattle noir and I myself watched Too Young To Die Old over the weekend and have been loudly touting it as genius. I wanted to scream, stay out of my head, Iain!
Sinclair leaves via LAX only to return later to the Chile of the exiled Roberto. This left my own thoughts and travels kneaded and knotted. I relish that awareness. There are tropes at play, if one wants to fancy a parallel to the infamous book on Nazis in South America we can parse some commonalities between Gary Snyder and Bill Burroughs. The hangers on only enhance these tendencies.
Sinclair leaves via LAX only to return later to the Chile of the exiled Roberto. This left my own thoughts and travels kneaded and knotted. I relish that awareness. There are tropes at play, if one wants to fancy a parallel to the infamous book on Nazis in South America we can parse some commonalities between Gary Snyder and Bill Burroughs. The hangers on only enhance these tendencies.
May 3, 2014
As a reader of Iain Sinclair books, one is just on the journey that he's taking. I'm happy to have him as my guide to the underworld that is London, but now, he's on my home turf, meaning America. Not only America, but it's Beat America. Sinclair journeys to the actual locations, but more important he journeys in the text of the Beat's literature. As well as follow their footsteps. And no, since it is Iain Sinclair, we're not getting a tour like on a tourist bus - the material for him is a empty canvas and he pulls out information, both facts and legend, and composes it on that canvas, which eventually becomes the book we're reading. I prefer the Iain way of lit-history than say to read, so-so did that and they didn't do that, etc. Also it is not only the big three in the Beat world, but also a lot of stuff on Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Lew Welch, and so forth. It is a very subjective approach to the Beats and their culture, and this is what makes this book fantastic.
August 28, 2020
This is another of Sinclair's rambling non-fiction collections (labelled as 'Documentary' in the book's prelims), and one of the better ones for me. As with many of his books, it combines psychogeographic wanderings with literary investigation and the search for coincidence and connection between writers and places. in this case, the subjects of his wanderings are the American poets/writers of the Beat era, including Charles Olson, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Cal Shutter, Ed Dorn and, a little incongruously, Malcolm Lowry. The famous ones, such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, had long been turned into mini-industries (they even made a terrible film version of 'On the Road'), but Sinclair seems particularly interested in the survivors such as Snyder (who is more interested in eco-politics and denies being a 'Beat') and the reclusive Shutter, whom he discovers to be obsessed with the Premier League and a fervent Man Utd fan (and fascinated by Wayne Rooney). He also manages to link his daily tramping round each new city with the enclosed walks of the incarcerated Nazi Albert Speer inside Spandau prison, in which he attempted to walk across the American Continent in his imagination.
It is all entertaining and informative (he is fun on American hotels, diners and historical film gossip), but it probably helps if you some sympathy or interest in the writers he is searching for (which I do). After he gets back from his long journey across the States to Hackney (after a stop-over in Hastings, the new exiles artistic home, it seems), he tells us that he has an email from Cal Shutter, the poet, who flatly tells him that he will 'never understand Americans', and he concurs that 'their intensities will never be mine' - this is a strangely downbeat ending to a good read.
It is all entertaining and informative (he is fun on American hotels, diners and historical film gossip), but it probably helps if you some sympathy or interest in the writers he is searching for (which I do). After he gets back from his long journey across the States to Hackney (after a stop-over in Hastings, the new exiles artistic home, it seems), he tells us that he has an email from Cal Shutter, the poet, who flatly tells him that he will 'never understand Americans', and he concurs that 'their intensities will never be mine' - this is a strangely downbeat ending to a good read.
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January 5, 2021Iain Sinclair comes to America and...walks around. That's what he does, after all. He manages to visit a handful of near-dead Beat poets (and more than a few ghosts) but to call any of his reports from these meetings "interviews" is to have a very loose definition of the word. After all, If "Biography is the biggest fiction" might as well settle for poetic-truth.
The prose is dense and dreamy, meandering along before drilling down into some forgotten sub-sub-counterculture, or reviving a long dead literary movement, finishing the paragraph in a different decade, on another continent, leaving the reader in an astonished daze. At least this reader who developed an adolescent obsession with the idea of the Beats more than anything else, and who'd take any excuse just to pluck their names in conversation: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder: let the embedded magic resonate...and then spent many years in embarrassed spite against my fallen idols. Sinclair here has brought me back, no longer to worship at their altar, but to briefly relish once again in that old feeling they once furnished.
The prose is dense and dreamy, meandering along before drilling down into some forgotten sub-sub-counterculture, or reviving a long dead literary movement, finishing the paragraph in a different decade, on another continent, leaving the reader in an astonished daze. At least this reader who developed an adolescent obsession with the idea of the Beats more than anything else, and who'd take any excuse just to pluck their names in conversation: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder: let the embedded magic resonate...and then spent many years in embarrassed spite against my fallen idols. Sinclair here has brought me back, no longer to worship at their altar, but to briefly relish once again in that old feeling they once furnished.
March 16, 2015
As a big fan of many Beat writers, this book was a disappointment. Perhaps Sinclair's road trip is too late by decades. The Gary Snyder visit is interesting, because Snyder is very well practiced at handling this sort of fly-by literary tourism. He's gracious, but also insightful enough to ask Sinclair what he wants. And it's clear that Sinclair doesn't know.
That's OK for a road trip book I suppose. It's a journey of discovery, right? But all I discovered was that I was bored. Reading about what Sinclair and his wife ate at some hotel on their way to visit old Beat icons put me to sleep. Better interviews would have helped. Imagine what Geoff Dyer could have done with this trip (besides adding sex and drugs).
That's OK for a road trip book I suppose. It's a journey of discovery, right? But all I discovered was that I was bored. Reading about what Sinclair and his wife ate at some hotel on their way to visit old Beat icons put me to sleep. Better interviews would have helped. Imagine what Geoff Dyer could have done with this trip (besides adding sex and drugs).
March 21, 2015
Would have liked it a lot more if it were half as long and edited by someone who's not in love with the sound of his own voice. Arty and affected, this guy just can't go a paragraph without trying to remind us that he, too, has a poet's soul. After a hundred pages it's just embarassing, like that friend of a friend who just won't stop bugging you to read his manuscript. The only redeeming point was being introduced to Charles Olson, who sounds worth checking out.
March 30, 2015
Name dropping travelogue of Beat Poet tour of the US. Didn't get vaguely interesting until the author visited Burroughs (but of course Burroughs was old and we didn't get much insight into his life except that his current schedule is centered around a methadone fix and a drink). As for what drove these Beats to reject the worldview of post-war America, barely sketched. Disappointing and excruciating to read.
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October 14, 2021A relatively slim volume, 'American Smoke' is an extract from Iain Sinclair's forthcoming (2011) book 'Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project'. Sinclair's prose is as sinuous and dreamlike as ever, and from the few pages here, which narrate a portion of an alternative US road trip without recourse to the car, I'm looking forward to reading the full book next year.
November 26, 2022
“‘You are not an American,’ Cal said. ‘You will never understand Americans. You want to see Olson and Dorn from their trips to England. Forget it, man. You’ll never begin.’ And I knew now that he was right. I was cured of my interests and obsessions. Cured by confrontation. Cured by the light on the sea. Their intensities would never be mine.”
That line, placed conveniently on the final page of the book, basically does the job of summarizing it for me. Perhaps its the attempted scope of all of North America, perhaps it’s the unfamiliar terrain, but whatever the case Sinclair struggles to make his sense impressions and interviews coalesce into something coherent in the way that he surveyed London in the other one I read, The Last London. He goes around interviewing his favorite authors and those that remember them, but the memories are fading, the insights gone- he can never get much out of anyone, it all feeling unsatisfying to both him and you. In the hands of a worse author this would be pretty terrible but Sinclair is good enough to make this a good bad roadtrip, leaving you with plenty on the futility of chasing around the dead/trying to understand what makes anyone, let alone private famous authors, tick and plenty of beautiful lines about the psychogeography of America. Definitely picks up when he hits the West Coast, or at least it does for someone with more experience in the locales he's spending time in.
That line, placed conveniently on the final page of the book, basically does the job of summarizing it for me. Perhaps its the attempted scope of all of North America, perhaps it’s the unfamiliar terrain, but whatever the case Sinclair struggles to make his sense impressions and interviews coalesce into something coherent in the way that he surveyed London in the other one I read, The Last London. He goes around interviewing his favorite authors and those that remember them, but the memories are fading, the insights gone- he can never get much out of anyone, it all feeling unsatisfying to both him and you. In the hands of a worse author this would be pretty terrible but Sinclair is good enough to make this a good bad roadtrip, leaving you with plenty on the futility of chasing around the dead/trying to understand what makes anyone, let alone private famous authors, tick and plenty of beautiful lines about the psychogeography of America. Definitely picks up when he hits the West Coast, or at least it does for someone with more experience in the locales he's spending time in.
November 25, 2023
This is a fantastic return to Iain Sinclair's passion for the Beat Generation. It is a bit of a return in time (see his Kodak Mantra Diaries republished a few years ago by Beat Scene magazine in the UK) and his interviews with Ginsberg whilst he was in London in 1967 for the Roundhouse conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, as well as interviews with the surviving Beats in the 1990s for BBC Radio 4. But also Malcolm Lowry and Dylan Thomas but to Gloucester (US) and the Black Mountain's Charles Olson.
As ever with Sinclair, you get a lot of interesting diversions, the journey being paramount, without turning into a travelogue as such, but combined with his passion for the psychogeography of place, he charts more than literary history. An essential read for fans of the Beats and Black Mountain.
As ever with Sinclair, you get a lot of interesting diversions, the journey being paramount, without turning into a travelogue as such, but combined with his passion for the psychogeography of place, he charts more than literary history. An essential read for fans of the Beats and Black Mountain.
June 16, 2016
Me ha fascinado. Soy fanática de la GB y este road trip es una maravilla. Me gusta mucho Sinclair. No hay palmadas en la espalda. Es todo como taan 1974... Incluso, hasta un poco 1844...
June 27, 2022
I found this book very difficult to get into, and sometimes I really felt like giving in. It seems as if Sinclair reveres and covets so much the Beat Generation's style that he over-uses it. Sometimes I simply had no idea what was happening, what he was talking about. He mentions name after name, and if you don't know all the people he's talking about you get lost in a sort of Dostoyevskian maze. There are some beautiful moments in the book though, and some very poetic phrases. I just don't quite understand what his angle is in this book, where he was trying to go with it. Sometimes it seems as though he's commenting on these lives, and sometimes he goes on and on about narcissistic, misogynistic and fascist Beat Generation celebrities without making a single comment about the fact that they are, at least in the case of someone like Céline, awful people. If you're really into the Beat Generation, then I would recommend the book, but I did struggle with it, and I have read Céline, Kerouac and Ginsberg among others, so I am no stranger to the style.
June 2, 2025
Well, he's an occasionally great writer, and an interesting Brit, and so interesting to hear his stories On The Road of visits mid 20th century writers or their survivors. Didn't really hang together or provide any punch lines, but pleasant enough. Delighted to see he knows a fellow walker in American Gregory Gibson, a kindred spirit and author of Walk in Progress, four volumes yet unpublished.
December 27, 2019
This book was a welcome diversion for me. I didn't know there was such a thing as a psychogeographer (am I getting that right? Is that what they call Sinclair in reviews?). I appreciate his earnest attempts to square humans and their doings with their times and places.
May 9, 2023
Un libro genial evocativo e inspirador. Denso e hiperactivo. Lleno de datos, nombres y bifurcaciones con muchas anécdotas. Pero tengo muy mala memoria y no suelo orientarme muy bien así que ya no me acuerdo de casi nada xdd :(
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February 19, 2024A latter day, very English iteration of the Beats: what if instead of shooting heroin and having sex with boys in Tangiers, you could get your transgressive kicks by going for walks and buying/selling used books?
August 10, 2014
Since making his name with the essay collection Lights Out for the Territory (1997), Iain Sinclair has pushed the boundaries of modern writing from one extreme to the other. Whether it's walking counter-clockwise around the M25 'to see where it leads', or repeatedly trying to infiltrate the London Olympic Park in the run-up to the games, he's an explorer as much as a writer, unravelling as he walks, peeling away history and literature as they settle in layers on every place he encounters.
In the time since selling his hand-written poetry collections on the streets of Hackney, Sinclair has carved himself a niche as one of Britain's best-loved counter-cultural figures. Every book he has written over the last 16 years has been a work to admire. This is why it's such a shame that his latest hotly-anticipated book, American Smoke, is just that: smoke.
The book follows the lives of the American Beats, seeking to walk in their footsteps across the great continent and link their paths together across the "tribal and connected" American cultural scene of the 1950s and beyond. There are no dates, though. Events occurred, or didn't, somewhere in the smoke of time. Everything in American Smoke is relative.
'Everybody met everybody,' Sinclair tells us. 'Everybody f*****d... They feuded, fought, formed intense friendships, sulked for generations.'
At the core of the book is Sinclair following the single thread left behind by the modernist poet Charles Olsen. He follows it as it winds across the continent through the lives and misadventures of the assorted Beats, including Kerouac, Malcolm Lowry, William Borroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Roberto Bolaño. The result, unfortunately, is a featureless blur of other people's lives, their sad hometowns and washed-out photographs.
During the chapter entitled "There's No Home", Sinclair writes about how he wanted to "travel to places where I would be a stranger, without language or backstory", in order to subvert the expectations placed on a writer, but this is the nagging problem at the heart of American Smoke. Whereas the Hackney laureate can bring the whole texture and history of London to life in a single sentence - the buildings of Spitalfields clustering around the Christ Church like kindling, for instance, or the rose red streets of Hackney - all we get from Sinclair's American experiment are skin-deep descriptions of tired waterfronts and run-down bars. The book feels rushed. It feels sprawling and featureless, like the continent itself, and in the end what we find ourselves reading is an account of a man getting lost in a place much larger than he is - truly the only way this story could ever end.
Although the book was published in London, it consistently uses American English spelling, which for me spelled either an attempt to engage with the textual culture of the book's subject matter, or an indication of where American Smoke is being most heavily marketed. This was the overall impression I walked away with: that Iain Sinclair is wandering away from what made - and still very reliably makes - him great.
The saddest aspect for me was the occasional self-indulgent tangents Sinclair engages in: an account of his trip down the Thames in a swan pedalo, for instance, or his "kodak-coloured excesses, the not-so-free festivals and stalled revolutions" of the late 1950s. In each of these moments, it feels as if Sinclair isn't so much writing a book about the Beats, but trying to write himself into the Beats. And in the end, the picture I came away with was this: while the Beats wrote exciting literature and lived wild lives, deep down they were dull, as all self-obsessed people are dull. Sinclair's book never manages to escape that situation.
This is not to say there aren't high points to American Smoke. Each sentence is highly wrought, and each page taken on its own is a fine work of art. Indeed, Sinclair is a stunning writer, at his best, and moments like the return to Bolaño's old stamping grounds, and the beach where Malcolm Lowry escaped to, and dubbed "Eridanus", are as erudite and polished as you can imagine.
The book has some delightful features, too. The hardback edition, for example, has a dust jacket that folds out into a map of the United States, with the Beat-related landmarks tactfully pointed out, and a guide to Jack Kerouac's endless circular journeys around the North American continent, searching for something he would never find.
The dust cover map creates an interesting interplay with the text itself, which is endlessly preoccupied with maps, but in the end winds up encapsulating why the book ultimately fails. The subjects of American Smoke are too big, disparate and myriad - like the smoke particles in an ash cloud. Sinclair is the master of narrow-and-deep, but not broad-and-shallow. This, sadly, is one knotted story he can't untangle by walking.
So American Smoke is a failure, if a beautiful one. By the final page, we feel like we have caught sight of the darlings of the Beat Generation the way we catch sight of Bigfoot: through the mist, or smoke; blurred, and through another person's lens.
In the time since selling his hand-written poetry collections on the streets of Hackney, Sinclair has carved himself a niche as one of Britain's best-loved counter-cultural figures. Every book he has written over the last 16 years has been a work to admire. This is why it's such a shame that his latest hotly-anticipated book, American Smoke, is just that: smoke.
The book follows the lives of the American Beats, seeking to walk in their footsteps across the great continent and link their paths together across the "tribal and connected" American cultural scene of the 1950s and beyond. There are no dates, though. Events occurred, or didn't, somewhere in the smoke of time. Everything in American Smoke is relative.
'Everybody met everybody,' Sinclair tells us. 'Everybody f*****d... They feuded, fought, formed intense friendships, sulked for generations.'
At the core of the book is Sinclair following the single thread left behind by the modernist poet Charles Olsen. He follows it as it winds across the continent through the lives and misadventures of the assorted Beats, including Kerouac, Malcolm Lowry, William Borroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Roberto Bolaño. The result, unfortunately, is a featureless blur of other people's lives, their sad hometowns and washed-out photographs.
During the chapter entitled "There's No Home", Sinclair writes about how he wanted to "travel to places where I would be a stranger, without language or backstory", in order to subvert the expectations placed on a writer, but this is the nagging problem at the heart of American Smoke. Whereas the Hackney laureate can bring the whole texture and history of London to life in a single sentence - the buildings of Spitalfields clustering around the Christ Church like kindling, for instance, or the rose red streets of Hackney - all we get from Sinclair's American experiment are skin-deep descriptions of tired waterfronts and run-down bars. The book feels rushed. It feels sprawling and featureless, like the continent itself, and in the end what we find ourselves reading is an account of a man getting lost in a place much larger than he is - truly the only way this story could ever end.
Although the book was published in London, it consistently uses American English spelling, which for me spelled either an attempt to engage with the textual culture of the book's subject matter, or an indication of where American Smoke is being most heavily marketed. This was the overall impression I walked away with: that Iain Sinclair is wandering away from what made - and still very reliably makes - him great.
The saddest aspect for me was the occasional self-indulgent tangents Sinclair engages in: an account of his trip down the Thames in a swan pedalo, for instance, or his "kodak-coloured excesses, the not-so-free festivals and stalled revolutions" of the late 1950s. In each of these moments, it feels as if Sinclair isn't so much writing a book about the Beats, but trying to write himself into the Beats. And in the end, the picture I came away with was this: while the Beats wrote exciting literature and lived wild lives, deep down they were dull, as all self-obsessed people are dull. Sinclair's book never manages to escape that situation.
This is not to say there aren't high points to American Smoke. Each sentence is highly wrought, and each page taken on its own is a fine work of art. Indeed, Sinclair is a stunning writer, at his best, and moments like the return to Bolaño's old stamping grounds, and the beach where Malcolm Lowry escaped to, and dubbed "Eridanus", are as erudite and polished as you can imagine.
The book has some delightful features, too. The hardback edition, for example, has a dust jacket that folds out into a map of the United States, with the Beat-related landmarks tactfully pointed out, and a guide to Jack Kerouac's endless circular journeys around the North American continent, searching for something he would never find.
The dust cover map creates an interesting interplay with the text itself, which is endlessly preoccupied with maps, but in the end winds up encapsulating why the book ultimately fails. The subjects of American Smoke are too big, disparate and myriad - like the smoke particles in an ash cloud. Sinclair is the master of narrow-and-deep, but not broad-and-shallow. This, sadly, is one knotted story he can't untangle by walking.
So American Smoke is a failure, if a beautiful one. By the final page, we feel like we have caught sight of the darlings of the Beat Generation the way we catch sight of Bigfoot: through the mist, or smoke; blurred, and through another person's lens.
December 5, 2017
exceptional prose, but gossipy
April 21, 2018
Dense. Page-for-page contender in category of sheer prose pleasure.
January 9, 2015
If I knew more about Beat writers and the high points of beat writing history, this book may have been more interesting. As I am, and as it is, I read it because I considered it in the category of cultural vegetables. The author, an Englishman who traveled to various spots around North America and Europe to walk in the footsteps of some Beat writers, has a great knack for description and poetic disassembly. Though I often couldn't figure out where he was, and sometimes even what he was talking about, I figured that was par for the course reading a book by someone who is so enamored by the Beat style.
Though the book's cover suggests this is a travel memoir, it's not. It is a series of musings and name drops from someone who is deeply in love with a writing style and lifestyle that don't resonate as they once did.
Though the book's cover suggests this is a travel memoir, it's not. It is a series of musings and name drops from someone who is deeply in love with a writing style and lifestyle that don't resonate as they once did.
August 7, 2014
The book is the story of an extended road trip by an Englishman in North America, meeting and interviewing his literary heroes, primarily beats. Gary Snyder is one of my favourite writers and when somebody publishes a book with a chapter about him I read it to see what I can learn. Not much in this case. I think it would be possible to precis the chapter in one or at most two paragraphs. Snyder could probably do it in a few terse stanzas. The book seemed to say more about Sinclair's finding North America foreign than about the lives or thoughts of the writers. Since there were a number of chapters devoted to the region I call home and two about the city I've lived in for fifteen years I can say his grasp of factual detail is not to be relied upon.
September 4, 2014
I think I would have lined this a lot more if is read some of Sinclairs books and more Beat writers work beforehand. It's one of those books I've read that I appreciate but can't say I really liked and I probably would have given up had I not been on holiday with nothing else to read.
It has made me more interested in everything he was talking about though and I did like the style on which he wrote it which was fairly different to a lot of other prose.
There were some lovely moments in there but that's about it.
It has made me more interested in everything he was talking about though and I did like the style on which he wrote it which was fairly different to a lot of other prose.
There were some lovely moments in there but that's about it.
Read
November 13, 2015"Sinclair has been known for his interest in psychogeography, and American Smoke exhibits throughout a keen sense of what D. H. Lawrence called “the spirit of place”—most notably, in a few lines, of Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where the details of “Heroic metaphors of success” make even the most jaded stop and look again." - Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma
This book was reviewed in the November 2015 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the November 2015 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
August 23, 2014
Iain Sinclair's American journeys in search of Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Malcolm Lowry and others. His descriptions and observations are interesting, but it is easy to get lost in his spirialing style as he does not indicate any dates, and hops from place to place at seeming random. Still it is a great experience. It was surprising to find a few nods to H.P. Lovecraft. I also enjoyed his coverage of some antiquarian book dealers.
January 2, 2017
This is bohemian literature about literary bohemians. Sinclair meets with the bohemians, and people who knew them, and walks around the places where they lived (or live), and his prose travels where his mind travels, through time & place, meandering, off on tangents; digressions are him. I agree with the jacket blurb reviewers who say that Sinclair's writing is inspired but you're more likely to enjoy this if you're someone who's interested in the Beats.
November 12, 2016
This book is titled "American Smoke" and features a map of the U.S. across both covers. Yet the essay / narrative arc doesn't reach the country until two-thirds through the book. The text itself often arrives in fragments, not sentences, as if it wants to be a prose poem and got stuck halfway in either direction. DNF.
Dustin Renwick,
Author, Beyond the Gray Leaf
Dustin Renwick,
Author, Beyond the Gray Leaf
February 21, 2015
Iain Sinclair resumes his psychogeographic tour, but switches from the familiar streets of London to a journey around a hidden America seen through the memory landscapes of the Beats. The book concentrates on the lesser known poets and writers who disappeared into the half-histories of myth and broken memories of the vast American landscape. Deeply written and multi-layered.
July 19, 2016
MAgnífico, el Kerouac de las crónicas. Sería material de primera para un trabajo de literatura comparada (y un buen referente de la literatura de viajes). El libro tiene algo de benetiano, tal vez sea impresión mía o la traducción, está en ese extraño limbo de los "libros para escritores".
(Sería genial añadir algunas de las fotografías a las que se hace referencia)
(Sería genial añadir algunas de las fotografías a las que se hace referencia)
January 21, 2014
I'm afraid I abandoned this book. It's very experimental in style which I found beautiful for short passages but heavy going for a whole book. The subject matter did not hold my attention sufficiently to carry on. Sorry
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