ALEXANDER TROCCHI CAIN BOOK PDF

Cain’s Book has ratings and 33 reviews. MJ said: Trocchi’s final and most fêted work (apart from the odds-and-ends poetry shambles, Man at Leisure, a. So begins Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi’s incredible novel of existential dread. Young Adam, its predecessor, is better known, but the latter is. Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi – book cover, description, publication history.

I’ve been down for some time now and there’s no more heroin. She would have betrayed him for a dry martini. He had the writing gift and he had the hustling gift. What a beautiful book! The writing around the day-to-day junkie life and the social and psychological aspects of addition is excellent – as good as any of the writing on heroin by the usual suspects. But Pilate never comes and neither does the great withdrawal, which for this kind of epic serves as the journey to the underworld.

I was so angry by the time I was done at the wasted potential. Jul 15, Jeff rated it really liked it Shelves: If “Junky” weren’t already a thinkin man’s book, I’d call this the thinkin man’s Junky. There is no plot in this novel, but more of a series of commentary on life as it is lived. This book wasn’t at all what I expected. Trocchi’s descriptive powers are mesmerising: But it is pain in the arse and we wonder at the impertinence of governments which by my own experience and that of my father and his father before him have consistently done everything in their power to make individuals treat the world situation lightly, that they should frown on the violence of my imagination—which is a sensitive responsive instrument—and set their damn police on me who has not stirred trcochi this room for trochci years except to cop shit.

It describes with an eye for detail the rituals of heroin, the cooking up and the search for a suitable trochi. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats… these are the facts.

The drug can be treacherous, leading through all the hollow recesses and caves of panic. It was a non-linear rhythm.

Cain’s Book

Back in England the writing dried up. It was short but not too short—50, words—the perfect length for a book, as Poe has said, to finish off in one sitting. Everything we do in life, even to make love, we do on a caij that is rolling towards death. Which I don’t think is the point of the book.

We wait for them as surely as we wait for the crucifixion in a alexnder play. To smoke opium is to leave the train en route; to concern ourselves with other things than life, than death. Trocchi had a gift.

Paris Review – from Cain’s Book

Merlin held on for 3 years and during that time established a bit of reputation—for the quality of the writing and the brilliant–and brilliantly erratic–behavior of the editor.

This page was last edited on 21 Octoberat The war had finished that one off—in spades. And there’s a whole chapter around a storm while on a scow that perhaps would have been at home in Moby-Dick but didn’t add much here.

Quotes from Cain’s Book. The publisher was Grove Press. There are doctors, painters, lawyers on dope, and they can still function. Id heard of this book–From Hank in San Francisco, fellow writer—or writer wannabe. I think you would like it. This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York.

It’s part of our folklore. Yes, horror of horrors, people do have sex, sometimes frequently, and they do take drugs. Claire was my sister-in-law. He cops, he shoots, he scores.

A cursory glance at history should caution us thus. I say ‘he’ because though the female of the species exists, she has a different meaning that I haven’t quite worked out.

She wasnt a hooker when they met. Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. Trivia About Cain’s Book. Tight with the Paris Review crowd, The Situationists, the porn group at Olympia, and drug addict galore. Everyone gets something out of it except the bok. Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.

But if you cant write you can at least read other writers who are. The action such as it is revolves entirely around Joe and his akexander junkies shooting dope or, when they are not doing that, running around in a frazzled state trying to score for dope.

I considered it to be a little disjointed which is I guess what a junky should sound like when writing a novel.