Based on Jack Kerouac’s real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a man’s doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.
“[Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race. . . . In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene.”—The New York Times Book Review
This short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man’s ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams.
This elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young woman’s pain and suffering.
- ISBN10 0140168117
- ISBN13 9780140168112
- Publish Date 1 June 1992 (first published 1 December 1978)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 25 October 2004
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
- Imprint Penguin USA
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 96
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780140168112