On the road

I am back from a 1 month long trip around Europe: it was a city-to-city travel mainly, mostly by train. I have some notes that I wrote while on the trip, do now know if they'll see this blog.

Meanwhile, and perhaps more interestingly, I finished reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It is one of the important books of the beat generation, and perhaps might have inspired plenty of people to do the beat/hippie life.

I was introduced to the author by the Murakami novel I wrote about in my previous post here. I found the book in the library (and could not find the book Murakami refers: Lonesome Traveler, except in French).

Anyway, the book was simply great. Initially I could find only random travels with nothing interesting, but then the characters reduced and the book started growing on me. While reading the book in a train in Switzerland, surrounded by tourist families who are there just for a couple of weeks, yet showing lonely faces, husbands avoiding wives, wives bored with kids, kids all excited, husbands and wives getting angry at each other, wives who are fat and unattractive because they ate what they liked food and lived lazily, and then about to go back to their anonymous, boring offices and associated lives, where there's so much to hide, so much sadness and loneliness and boredom to hide, I mightily pondered about what kind of life to lead. A keyword I found in the book is: "He gave it absolutely no attention" ("it" means different things at different time.

The language is endearing, the loneliness, the sadness and the happiness, friendship, all so beautiful.

I would like to find a copy of Lonesome Traveler and read that too. But before that, I am reading about the Beat Generation, what happened, etc.