Title: On the Road
Author: Jack Kerouac
Rating: 5/5
Author: Jack Kerouac
Rating: 5/5
The book is absolutely incredible. It is not constant, it can be quite tedious and there are flaws to it, but it has spirit and a style and language that makes the reading one fantastic experience and it feels real. As the title says, the book tells the experiences of Sal Paradise, or Jack Kerouac, and Dean Moriarty, or Neal Cassidy, while travelling through America's roads during different years, each time learning something different, doing things differently, meeting new people, but always with such intensity that leaves one breathless and wanting to jump into the book, to cross those roads with those characters. They are people that live theirs lives to their fullest, trying to find meaning, and they define a generation named "beat" by the same protagonist who drove around, looking for something else. I have grown to admire these guys, who had everything to be just ordinary scholars, but because they lived their lives to their fullest, they became something more. It is one story different from any other I've read and it's inspirational. I had to put the book down a couple of times because there was just too much going on, or too little. The way the story is made it seems like a song, not unlike the jazz played in the late 1940s, where the interludes of calmness suddenly are changed with an explosion of a sax or the drums, where the bass is constant but shines. It is one book everybody should read; a book I will read many more times and maybe even do the same path they did, through the Route 6 from New York to Denver, maybe further; it is a lesson on living life to its fullest, and one I plan on keeping. Basically, as I've said before, it's awesome. Not perfect, but worth the 5-stars rating.
