Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

by Richard Fariña, Thomas Pynchon (Introduction)

A witty, psychedelic, and telling novel of the 1960s

Richard Fariña evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily, and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age. The hero, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, weaves his way through the psychedelic landscape, encountering-among other things-mescaline, women, art, gluttony, falsehood, science, prayer, and, occasionally, truth.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, American, 20th Century

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1966

About the author

Richard George Fariña was an American writer and folksinger.
With an Irish mother and a Cuban father, Farina was born a rebel. He grew up in Brooklyn, pre-revolutionary Cuba and Ireland. At 18 he was associated with members of the IRA, and was asked to leave Ireland. At Cornell University in the late fifties Farina was suspended for his part in a student protest, but was promptly reinstated when fellow students threatened to take further action to support him.
Leaving Cornell in 1959, he lived in Paris and London, surviving by 'music, street-singing, scriptwriting, acting, a little smuggling, anything to hang on'. In 1963 he returned to America and married Mimi Baez, sister of Joan, and they became a folk duo. Their debut album was recommended by the New York Times as one of the ten best releases of 1965.
Farina was killed in a motorbike accident, just two days after his book Been Down so Long It Looks Like Up to Me had been published. The book has become a cult classic among fans of the 1960s and counterculture literature. The novel also had a huge influence on his close friend Thomas Pynchon, who later dedicated his book Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to Fariña

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Fariña stands at the crossroads of postmodernism and beat culture…
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me – the title is already a pure poetry. And everything that you may find inside is thoroughly innovative and absolutely and fantastically postmodern but the tale is about the retreating into the past beat generation… A requiem of sorts.
Not for nothing Thomas Pynchon dedicated his Gravity's Rainbow to Richard Fariña.

I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.

The hero’s name Gnossos is a talking name – it is derived from the Greek term ‘Gnosis’ and may be interpreted as a ‘possessor of esoteric knowledge’.

“We share a dissipating current, Gnossos. Like transformer coils, you see, we mistake induction for generation. Vicarious sampling is all that remains; the sour evening game of the academies.”

Mankind is on the wrong as usual. And on the quest to find the meaning, hiking through the psychedelic landscapes, one may find instead human meanness without limits.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

Smirky superior hectoring hipster cultivates cringemaking condescension, bullying braggadocio and sexual sneering in wearisome war on straight society. I really would have liked our protohippy hero Gnossos Pappadopoulis to die of a drug overdose around page seven but he didn’t. Could be Gnossos is actually Holden Caulfield on acid. That would account for my immediate and total hatred of him.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two big things this book had working in its favor before I even cracked open Richard Fariña's under-appreciated final gem: The Pynchon connection (which is was what nudged me in the direction of this novel in the first place, albeit more than a year after "Gravity's Rainbow" mournfully introduced me to Fariña) and my own probably-over-romanticized-at-this-point affinity for my college experience, with Pynchon's intro (which includes an obligatory kazoo-choir reference!) being, of course, a voyeuristic delight of the highest order right until the moment it crashed back to heartbreaking reality and the novel's not-entirely-fictitious collegiate antics serving as a not-entirely-unpleasant reminder of why I was so reluctant to let go of college life.

And then, during the year's last handful of blessedly slow days at the Crappiest Place on Earth, I discovered that actually taking my lunch hour to hunker shoelessly down in the backseat of my car with a blanket and a book is pretty much the best thing to ever happen to my sanity professional life. Observe the photographic proof of my sublime on-the-clock refuge:



(Thank bouncing Baby Jesus that Fariña's Cornell chum desensitized me to complex equations interrupting literature.)

So now a novel that was published two days before its author's far-too-early death has found an even fonder association in my own personal landscape, thanks to my unyielding dissatisfaction with and need to escape from a job that takes me farther and farther from where I wanted to be at this point in my life.

I am so glad that I read this book now, rather than as a starry-eyed undergrad with dreams of running the NYT and writing The Greatest American Novel of My Generation on the side. I have a better sense of how life is not something that can be planned for, that growing up is fucking hard even with a willingness to let one's inner child have a say every now and again, that death is always lurking around every corner, and coming to this novel without even one of those hard lessons under my belt would have reduced this from a poignantly frenzied love song of youth's last discoveries to an instruction manual for college kids who just want to shake things up (not that there's anything inherently wrong with living in the moment and taking inconsequentially stupid chances, for those are the backbone of the best Hey, Remember When...? tales). I absolutely would have embraced any opportunity to cause a scene at a formal frathouse dinner like Gnossos Pappadopoulis (Fariña's thinly veiled stand-in for himself) did, just as I had also proclaimed myself in love with wrong guy after wrong guy based on a series of limited-engagement liaisons, as Gnossos did with Kristin, his obsession in green knee-socks and loafers.

My tendency to relate too personally with literary characters came out to play for keeps as Gnossos became a clearer and clearer picture; save for a few lapses into first-person narration, this is a story told mostly in third-person with a focus on GP, so it takes some time to get a sense of his motivation and how others perceive him (it takes a little longer to reconcile the two seemingly at-odds realities). And perhaps I was imposing my own inner workings on Gnossos but I left this book with a sense of awed kinship inspired by his mostly successful attempts to hide his soft heart under an ornery facade. He wants to feel, he wants to live, he wants to be earnest in his devil-may-care approach to throwing himself into living but he is woefully, painfully afraid of doing so because fully embracing life means also acknowledging that death is the inevitable end game.

Gnossos seems like the kind of maniac ringleader whose enthusiasm and passion attract unresisting friends and followers in droves but his attitude obscures a desperate desire to fall in love rather than indulge in a series of unemotional physical encounters, which is what it seems will finally help him stop fighting thanathos with an unequivocally driving life force. Had I not read Pynchon's "Entropy" in college, I would have probably missed the significance of how Gnossos has hermetically sealed himself inside every room he occupies in an attempt to artificially preserve life against the natural encroachment of death -- until his night with Kristin has him throwing open windows with the zeal of a man possessed. He is a character who fights the unpleasant reality with the much more pleasing act of losing oneself in the moment and clinging to that happiness as if that's all it takes to preserve that joy for eternity. As his attempts at pleasant stasis become more desperate and he loses control over situations that initially plopped him on top of the world, it becomes more obvious that this is a guy who wants freedom without responsibility -- and, in the end, isn't that what college is all about?

It's Bukowski once you've swapped the booze for drugs. It's Hunter S. Thompson with an overt awareness that death is nipping at his heels. It's Kerouac as a college kid. It's Pynchon with narrative restraint. But most of all, it's both proof that Fariña's early death was a huge loss to the literary world and a tribute to a screamingly talented artist who knew how to find the biggest truths in the smallest moments while laughing and kicking death in the ass. Because as much as Gnossos (and, presumably, Fariña) feared death, his ability to suck the marrow from every moment is the ultimate victory of life.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Farina is something of a role model to me. If I could model my life after his I would - all except the dying in a motorcycle accident two days after my first novel is published. But besides this I would like to:

1. release acoustic driven music with my beautiful girlfriend/wife

2. Publish a novel centered around a smooth-talking, fast-living, drug-ingesting protagonist named Gnossos (yes, that's right his name is Gnossos and you don't even wanna know his last name)

3. Participate in campus demonstrations against draconian campus policies.

and 4. Be Thomas Pynchon's best friend and have Gravity's Rainbow dedicated to me; I mean how fuckin' cool would that be.

But all personal coolness aside, "Been Down So Long.." is actually a good novel. While a bit dated (as this was written in the sixties), and a bit misogynistic (he lies about using a contraceptive just so he can get some), the novel is buzzing in style, dripping in a sixties coolness and an extemporaneous desire for change. Gnossos, while sometimes loathsome, is also entertaining to be around. This is not a novel I would recommend to most women; they might like it if they are into Bukowski or something similar, but most probably will not. I think I like the novel more than I think it is actually good. When I picked it up the title struck me as something so modern, like the title of some indie rock band's second album, and when I read the first chapter it was written with such verve and humour that it immediately had me hooked. More so than that the ending threw me for a loop and showed me that this was more than an "On The Road" wanderlust excuse to drink and take drugs (although there is a rather large element of that) But more so it was about the effects of trying to maintain a detached cool in the midst of so much cultural change; and even more universal than that, it's about trying to go through life and never be embarrased or made foolish, and only portray the most laid-back, witty, and insouciant calm that no real person actually has. And, of course, anyone who drinks, takes drugs, lies and sleeps around is the complete opposite of these things; he's an insecure man who has been down so long that it starts looking like up.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Someone recommended this book as the quintessential novel of the 1960s. Well, I'm a child of the 60s -- but I found the book a confused mess, and didn't get far before giving up. The protagonist is a drunken college student and con-man who is remarkably unlikeable. Nothing that he does goes well. Including the sex. Or the drugs. Anyway, I read a chapter or two, then started skimming, until it became clear that I pretty much hated the book. Not for me!

[Oriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

before
Picking this up seems like a very logical progression from Stone Junction: both mystical journeys, both introduced by Thomas Pynchon, both books I remember loving a decade ago but don't really remember.

I'm a little nervous re-reading this, because it shines in my mind as one of the best things I ever read, and I certainly don't want to prove that untrue. But I'm sure it's as amazing as I remember it, right? Right????

after
Spoiler: wrong.

This past summer I went to a "Summer of Love" exhibit at MoMA. Let me just make it clear that I was raised by hippies and even lived on a hippie farm for the first few years of my life; Grateful Dead was my favorite band until I was 13, and I still compost every single carrot peel and eggshell, even though it means schlepping a gross drippy bag of rotting fruit bits on the subway twice a week. So yeah, I obviously went to the "Summer of Love" exhibit at MoMA with very high hopes.

Turned out I actually found it really confusing and depressing. Not because the art was bad; it was great. But all the "trippy" neon and psychedelic tie-dye and black-lit swirls just felt so silly to me, so overdone and clichéd and kind of pathetic.

But here's the thing: none of that stuff was clichéd. It's just that every freaking thing that's been done since ripped it off, reducing and devaluing it all by sheer oversaturation into something cloying and mass marketed and hokey.

And so it is with Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. I know that in the '50s when this was written, the jargon, the attire, the struggles and quests were groundbreaking and awe-inspiring and amazing. But now... it's just been copied ad nauseum, more and more reductively and simplistically each time, by so many awful wannabes, that the whole thing feels stale, a little clunky, a little sad.

And so oh la. This is still an amazing book, but in a crushing blow I've had to demote it from my "perennial favorites" shelf to "formative reading." I mean, this book had a dramatic effect on me as a teenager, but -- though it grieves me to admit -- it just didn't blow my mind as a semi-adult.

For those who've never read it, it's absolutely worth a look, as long as you're prepared to be kind to it, and meet it on its own terms: serious psychedelica, spirit quests, campus unrest, an inevitable road trip to Cuba, and lots and lots and lots of drugs.

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst book I have ever read. Yes, it's trippy, but it's also sexist as hell, sensationalist, and extremely pretentious -- in both style and matter. It's counter-culture in all the stupid ways -- oooh, drug-taking is awesommmmeeee man -- and not critical of the protagonist, whose name actually means "knowledge," as he acts on the same base prejudices that make mainstream culture so rotten. A hands-down trash book.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hip college student tries to avoid involvement in anything meaningful while living a life of hedonistic extremes.

Been Down So Long It Looks like Up to Me, title taken from an old blues song, is just another way to say what a long, strange trip it's been. Richard Fariña, a writer, musician, and songwriter, was killed in a motorcycle accident two days after the publication of this, his only novel, which lends an eerie reality to the frequent invocations of death (Thanatos) in the text. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, hilarious as it's meant to be, is an often misunderstood book. Set in 1958 but with overtones of the 60's, the main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a beatnik, hipster, proto-hippie, college student, and our deeply flawed anti-hero, refuses to conform to the rules of society: he is a bully, thief, and seducer. Seriously unreliable, he lives his life by a code of non-involvement, "exemption," in which he maintains his cool at all costs and refuses responsibility for his actions. Except he doesn't: there are consequences to this life. Although Gnossos is vengeful and willfully oblivious to the effect his actions (often fueled by drugs) have on others (generally those doing him a favor), he later feels guilt for these acts, and in a variant on the laws of physics, his willful acts are paid back doublefold by whatever gods there be. In a darkly humorous and Nabokovian way he's charming; you might not want him for a friend, but you'd want to know him, from a distance perhaps. He's not for squares -- sex and drugs abound. As with J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man, the reader feels some sympathy for Gnossos' painful inability to conform. But while the reader may ponder the figurative bumps and bruises, Richard Fariña has galloped pages ahead and Gnossos is now miles away, until his exempt status is threatened by love and he's drawn into the edges of campus insurrection. The story is a wild ride, at times reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, who knew Fariña in college and wrote the introduction, and like Pynchon, the story is a little deeper than expected if you take the time to read without prejudice. The writing is notable for the Whitmanesque lists attempting to encapsulate the times. The ending is unexpected but just right for the excellent Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Three final notes: (1) just as I feel Catcher in the Rye is best first read while in one's teens, this may be best first read before age 25 or so; (2) for those who will wonder, because it comes up, paregoric is a tincture of opium, apparently legal at the time; (3) I think many of the critics of this book either didn't catch the "pay the piper" theme, or didn't read to the end, which of course is typical of critics. [5★]

[Trish · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I read that Pynchon was best buds with Fariña and that this novel had a setting at Cornell, I was interested. However much Pynchon loved the guy, this is not particularly good writing. Think the drugs are a little harder to work around for some folks. Fariña was lucky that he had a great, nourishing friendship in a gorgeous, bucolic setting. His immortality is not guaranteed with this work.

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, if you ever want proof of how sixties totems don't really age well, this is the book for you. The cult following has been long if somewhat subterranean, its duration due in part to the unfortunate circumstance of its author dying in a motorcycle accident only a couple dozen hours after its publication (and only a few months before the mythological motorcycle accident of Farina's "brother-in-law," Bob Dylan). It also helps your literary endurance to have gone to Cornell with both Thomas Pynchon and C. Michael Curtis of Atlantic Monthly fame. Readers will be forgiven for wondering, in fact, if Pynchon didn't have a hand in the book since its manic energy and style are simpatico to both V and The Crying of Lot 49. When I first read this the summer before I went to college (right after the edition with Farina's face on it came out---the new edition with the upside down crotch shot doesn't do much to sell the legend) there were even rumors that Pynchon WAS Farina, or Farina WAS Pynchon. Or something like that. In the end, reading the book is a lot like watching WILD IN THE STREETS or maybe even VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (best scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy40TT... thanks, MST3K): it's best enjoyed with tongue in cheek. Maybe in the end the important thing this book documents is how the youth rebellion associated with the sixties had a hard time rising about juvenility. (Suffice to say that a moral stand in this plot revolves around flipping off the evil campus VP). All that said, you can still watch clips of the Berkeley Free Speech days and appreciate why aggressive generational politics was necessary back in the day: old people really acted like mean old people before 1966. Nobody above 25 gave two shits about being cool or hip. So the book really captures the late 50s period when weed, premarital sex, and long hair were indeed considered threats to the social order. That makes for an interesting if not always sympathetic document. As many commentators have remarked, rebellion here is a boys club---you can draw a straight line from the humor to Animal House and realize frattiness was in the blood even if you were vehemently anti-frat. Anyway, worth a gander for nostalgia's sake. Farina's musical career is actually more emotionally engaging if you aren't put off by the sort of folk music that prefers dulcimers to acoustic blues noodling and has titles like "Reflections in a Crystal Wind." Personally, I dig it, baby. RF's wife was the gorgeous and highly underestimated Mimi Farina (Joan baez's kid sister). She survived her husband by thirty-five years but still died way too young, nearly a decade ago now.

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my hands-down, desert-island favorite novel, and like all favorite novels, my own adoration is rooted in such particular tastes I understand why very few of my friends like the book.

Farina was a successful folk musician, playing with his wife Mimi Baez and touring with Bob Dylan and her sister Joan in the 60s. The Cuban-Irish author was also a published poet, and wasn't known for his fiction until this novel, his first and last. Three days after its publication, Farina was killed in a motorcycle crash.

This novel stands on its own even without the coincidental pedigree of its author (friends with Pynchon at Cornell). Essentially a 60s campus novel set at a veiled Cornell in the 50s, our perspective is a unique third-person limited omniscience written in the same tone and voice of the protagonist, Greek itinerant Gnossos Pappadopolis. There's a level of farcical allusion and playful lyricism that put off many readers, but rewards close reading. It allows Farina to encapsulate a wide range of topics without appearing false: the youthful hubris of immortality, here called Immunity; the naive spirit of protest and general counterculture billowing on campuses nationwide in the Age of Aquarius; the outside world, a place of spurious rules and authority figures best ignored as long as possible; and even, despite the protective bubble of the college setting, real consequence and sadness. Farina tackles almost every American issue in this beguiling text, all through the eyes of one of Kerouac's "mad ones."

Of course, the bubble of Immunity pops in the end, grounding the book in a reality all too familiar for 60s children. The journey there, with its unforgettable characters and set pieces (and that language!), is one I take at least once every year.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the strangest books I've ever read, a bizarre and perverse adaptation of the Odyssey; complete with a giant turd in the narrative, it's an indictment of the counterculture of the 1960s, a response against academia and prestigious schools, and of course, set amidst the backdrop of Cornell University and Cuba, both places that Mr Farina was familiar with.

💩

[Paul Secor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this in the late sixties and wasn't impressed back then. I first experienced Richard Farina as a mediocre singer and songwriter, and his fiction writing fell into the same category. I guess that much of his reputation rests on his good looks and his early death in a motorcycle accident - also his friendship with Thomas Pynchon. None of which has anything to do with good writing.
I have no desire to reread this. I'll trust my early memories.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what On The Road would/could have been if Kerouac had A) been a much better writer, and B) had more complex attitudes about stuff like race and gender. Another winner from Pynchon.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to think that attitudes have evolved since this book first appeared in 1966. Certainly I would like to think my own have evolved since I first read it decades ago. Re-reading it now, it is as misogynistic as I remember.

So why did I re-read it in 2018, while the #MeToo movement continues to make the news? Partly for Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the novel, and partly for the pleasure of Farina's style. Like much of Pynchon's work, Farina's writing here is a poetry of hip (for 1966) cultural references, college humor and Zen monk clowning. But in order to enjoy the text on this level, you have to be able to disentangle it from the more repellent parts of the plot. So it is like reading Lolita. Perhaps a better comparison could be made to watching Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, where you can enjoy the technical mastery of the cinematography and editing while disagreeing with everything you are seeing on the screen.

Still interested? With all its sex, recreational drug use and destructive pranks Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is like an edgier, darker Animal House. The protagonist, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, is a hippie Zorba and a spirit of anarchy not unlike Dean Moriarty (On the Road) or Randall McMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

Acquired Summer 1983
Classics Book Shop, Montreal, Quebec

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I have been working away at my 1966 reading list. As always, I am finding that novels in the middle of a decade show changes that have been building up in both subject matter and style. This first novel by Richard Farina is now known as The Classic Novel of the 1960s. Sadly, the author died in a motorcycle crash two days after its publication, but that was like a coda to the story. Gnossos Pappadopoulis, the hero of a wild campus revolt, was the sort who might die in a similar way.

Set on a fictional college campus based on Farina’s alma mater of Cornell University, the story begins as Gnossos roles back into town after a wild summer out west. The fall semester of 1958 begins and some of the more adventurous students are ripe to rebel against the strict morality codes regarding student housing. If you were in college then you remember. Curfews for the girls who were locked into their dorms and sorority houses after 10:00 PM. A Women’s Judiciary Board disciplined coeds who did not make it back before curfew.

Students began to protest as Spring ramped up the hormones and a demonstration in May, storming the home of the University president, resulted in suspension of four upperclassmen, Farina among them. Or I should say, Gnossos Pappadopoulis was suspended.

That would have been irreverent and entertaining enough, but through Gnossos’s relationship with a certain young woman of wealth and privilege the tale expands into socio-political territory. Having read so many of the books of the time as well as growing up in the time, I attest that Farina nailed it!

I don’t know for sure how much Farina had been a reader of earlier experimental writers, but I felt the influence of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, even Henry Miller. I do know that when I got to college the scene was loosening up for boys and girls. It went from getting warnings about PDA (public display of affection) in the lobby of my dorm to coed dorms in about three years during the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of us at the time read Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me while getting high and practicing Free Love! This time I had to track down a copy from a used-book site

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is one of those novels like Naked Lunch that seems to have been written in a drug-induced frenzy. Though the word frenzy might suggest speed, it took Richard Fariña over five years to write this book. Sometimes I think that all would be revealed if I got high before reading it, sort of like getting high before a Grateful Dead concert. God knows it drags when you're straight and sober.

The main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, has long been cited as the missing link between the beatniks and the hippies. He evolves from beatnik into the original, archetypal hippie. He set out on the road and found nothing but did find the keys to inner enlightenment in the form of hallucinogenic drugs. Whereas the beatniks used drugs to escape reality the hippies used them to transcend reality. But in the end it all amounts to the same thing.

Although it was set in early in 1958 at Cornell, it wasn't published until the spring of 1966. Fariña was ahead of his time and probably couldn't have gotten the book published before that, but the times were changing and rapidly catching up with him. But by the time the world had caught up with him, he was gone, killed in a motorcycle accident two days after the book was published.

His death only contributed to the cult status that the book would achieve, heralded as it was as being the Catcher in the Rye or On the Road of that decade. It might have been different--no, it would have been different if Fariña had lived to write again. In retrospect it would have been a first novel that merely showed promise rather than the voice of a unrealized genius snuffed out in the prime of life. Like James Dean dying at 25 after having made only three movies rather than growing old and bloated like Brando. Fariña is the James Dean of literature, he will always be young and good looking.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like, I imagine, many people who read this book, I picked it up because Thomas Pynchon dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to its author and, when I looked him up on the Internet, it seemed he was an interesting character and it might be worth reading a book by him. The fact that this was his first novel and that he was killed in a motorcycle accident just two days after its publication just adds to the mystery and myth that surrounds Farina.

But, if truth be told, this book has little to recommend it to anyone other than students of the Sixties. The book cover states: Richard Farina evokes the Sixties as precisely, wittily and poignantly as F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the Jazz Age”. That might well be the case (I was only 5 years old when the book was published and only 9 years old when the Sixties turned into the Seventies, so I can’t really comment), although somehow I doubt it: the writing isn’t great (I cannot see how some people came up with a theory that Farina and Pynchon are/were the same person) and the story isn’t actually all that interesting.

Interestingly, the book cover also says the book as Thomas Pynchon writes in the introduction, "comes on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch." I’ve read the introduction twice including once as a web version I found where I could use the text search option, and I can tell you he doesn’t say that (I believe he may have said it on the dust jacket of one edition, but certainly not in the introduction included in this edition).

So, not a complete waste of time (the section with the wolf story redeems it a bit), but 1.5 stars rounded up to 2.

[Andrew]

Another one of those American writers who made a big splash when they came out and pushed literature in new directions (and was a major influence on Pynchon to boot), but who has largely been forgotten now. A lot of wacky counterculture-era lit comes off as obnoxious, juvenile, and self-important now (Tom Robbins, an unfortunately sizeable chunk of Burroughs' and Vonnegut's output), but Been Down So Long holds up. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, it's funny and picaresque enough to hold strong. Do yourself a favor and go pick this one up, it deserves a place in the American canon.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many other 60s college grads, I heard the rumor that my school (Ohio U.) was the basis for this coming of age, surreal 60s college scene novel. Written by Joan Baez' brother in law, who died the night of the publication party for this book in a motorcycle accident, it still holds up after all this time.

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

1st from fariña for me...paperback...the intro from pynchon...1966...

a dedication: this one is for mimi

this follows:
"i must soon quit the scene..."
benjamin franklin
in a letter to george washington
march 5, 1780

a contents pages...21 chapters...begins:

book the first
to athene then.

young gnossos pappadopoulis, furry pooh bear, keeper of the flame, voyaged back from the asphalt seas of the great wasted land: oh highways u.s. 40 and unyielding 66, i am home to the glacier-gnawed gorges, the fingers of lakes, the golden girls of westchester and shaker heights. see me loud with lies, big boots stomping, mind awash with schemes.

you bet...onward & upward

time & place...scene settings
*a current 1958 calendar...in gnossos "paps" pappadopoulis's rucksack
*and...either late december, possibly january, the start of another whatever, semester/quarter, neither word used
*chapter 5, march came fumbling in like a wizard of oz lion
*a date...in the letter/paps...to the sun: april, 1958
*another date, late in the story: may 13, 1958, close to the end
*athene...which may or may not be metaphorical...a well-hilled land, or perhaps the campus itself
*academae avenue
*the greyhound bus station
*#109, the pad where paps & hardy fitzgore will stay
*a purple passion party where paps & heff stole the d-phi car the previous christmas, used to kidnap mary, the baby jesus, and sebastian
*harpy creek...their destination...the bridge
*guido's grill...where the kidnapped shepherd on tabletop
*the plato pit
*louie's...they're tearing it down to build
*larghetto lodge
*student laundries
*mentor university, founded 1894...perhaps the non-metaphorical name?
*jove dormitory
*the law school w/its university gothic
*the new engineering building
*one of the varnished picnic tables in the plato pit next to the jukebox
*blue-tinted campus...illuminated tall clock tower
*labyrinth avenue
*a charcoal-gray aston martin
*the d.u. driveway...a fraternity
*a bathroom, a bedroom, a closet
*the secure entrance to a photography shop
*dryad road
*newman club...the monsignor extends an invite to paps
*anagram hall
*polygon hall
*office of the dean, anagram hall
*the painter, calvin's, black saab
*new mexico...where paps had been
*arapho motor inn (new mexico/desert)
*the boyscout camp...paps/past year...hid out
*calvin's somber clapboard boarding house
*one of the shedding australian umbrella trees
*the greco-turkish supply company in the negro section downtown
*hector ramrod hall...scene of the nativity kidnapping
*minotaur hall
*another bathroom
*quonset astronomy lab
*gambling hall of a las vegas hotel (no name, alas)
*the edge of a salt flat where a nuclear explosion is witnessed
*david grun's farm
*the high-ceilinged living-room of the old house
*the greenhouse...at the farm
*the town of dryad
*the party barn, next to the dairy queen
*the black elks downtown
*circe iii, is the girls' dormitory
*courtyard
*the san francisco coexistence bagel shop
*maeander lake/hydroelectric dam
*a bus
*downtown in kresges'
*the dairy queen just opened today
*the bathroom of #109 (see quote)
*ovid hall...to be torn down, "the testicular aesthetic extension of the tall clock tower..."
*fitzgore's impala comvertible
*coprolite hall
*another bathroom
*the surgical silence of the infirmary john
*washington, d.c.
*a gas station booth
*the gas station on the perimeter of the city (d.c.)
*the washington monument
**richmond, viginia
*mother flecther's kountry kitchen
*emporia, virginia
*a safeway parking lot
*a yellow lincoln
*the shores of the muddy santee river
*charleston...fort sumter
*savannah
*a motel w/beds that vibrated
*woodbine, georgia
*jacksonville, florida...st augustine...titusville, ft. pierce, lake worth, fort lauderdale, miami
*p & o pier
*the s.s. florida
*the small ballroom amidships
*shell-pocked morro castle in havana harbor, cuba
*calle o'reilly
*hotel casa hilda
*a balcony of same
*hotel nacional
*residential section of vedado
*a decrepit pock-marked bar
*varadero beach
*a plane
*the dorchester in london
*the clearing under the trees

characters
*gnossos "paps" pappadopoulis, our hero, returned to schooling from a year away, a hunting trip, immunity has been granted to me, for i do not lose my cool...he claims to be "ian evergood" before pamela who is british, murderess of cypriot peasants. called "nooses" by john mayke, called "mr pappadopolum" by rajamuttu, "mr pappadoo" by the switchbrd operator
pamela watson-may, british chic, answers the door at #109, no eyebrows, in the school of architecture, she is subletting...she is also a hieress to $80 billon (in gold)...oil money
*the landlord who lives in the country
*george & irma rajamuttus, neighbors, from benares, george is hotel administration, factotum studies, master bartending
*hardy fitzgore, carrot-red hair & freckled nose, smaller than gnossos...to share #109 w/paps. he is in a fraternity, too. "gorzy" "gore"
*fat fred...one of the black elks, downtown
*the golden girls, shopping for dainties in lairville
*the great white pattern maker lying in his prosperous bed
*heffalump "heff", a quadroon, thin 1/4-spade body, called "horralump" by paps...real name is abraham jackson white
*some nympho in circe iii who's screwing everybody since heff left her
*a girl in green knee-socks, some kind of genius in government
*jack, a girl, joan-of-arc hair-do
*susan b. pankhurst, vice-president for student affairs
*memphis slim...known by paps
*two co-eds buying corn muffins
*the woman at the cash register, w/a potato for a face, complexion like wheatena
*bright-eyed rushees
*two freshmen football heroes w/android heads
*house officers in harris tweeds
*john mayke...at d.u. fraternity
*al strozier, ohio, same
*mike peel, chicago, same
*rushees, brothers...president of the house
*byron agneau, a stranger w/horn rims, lit major, minor theatre arts
*the monkey-demon
*harold wong, the chinese dwarf, coxy of the olympic crew
*pam's fiance, simon
*a peculiar figure danced out of the shadows, death, a bald teenager
*monsignor putti...administers extreme unction to paps
*proctor slug
*some spic in a cowboy suit and
*a guy from the mentor daily sun
*g. alonso oeuf, ten years on the academic scene
*aquavitus...heff's buddy, i think...possibly giacomo?
*dean magnolia, molder of men, offices in anagram hall, mentor university
calvin blacknesse, to him alone could the wanderer speak secrets, the 1st to mention the cat apart from aquavitus
*david grun, w/the two dots over the u...has a greenhouse, musician, 40-yr-old, has a 6th daughter
*robin, all named after birds...robin is the baby
*catbird, (david's wife...i think) tern, sparrow, kiwi, bobwhite, other daughters, later, we get towhee, & yeah, catbird is the mother
*beth...calvin's woman
*louie motherball...some sort of indian holy guy or something...drugs, or not...taking the indians for all they have, $ and so forth...new mexico/paps/past
*sydney greenstreet...
*some starving pueblo chic...new mexico/paps/past year
*shifts of indians fell by in flannel blankets, same
*pachucos/same
*this one particular boy scout/same
*the fuzz...the sheriff/new mexico/same
*some chic from radcliffe, kind of a muse, picked me up on her way to vegas
*beth, wife of calvin blacknesse
*kim, their daughter, 11, 12 yrs old
*apricot, their cat
*students were meanwhile packed together in polyethylene booths
*coeds in mohair sat nibbling
juan carlos rosenbloom, from maracaibo...was at the roulette wheel prior...w/paps, others...chemical engineer
*drew youngblood
*a waitress
*guido...of guido's grill
judy lumpers, a gov't major
*jimmy brown, the newsboy
*bathing coeds in harpy creek gorge
*heap...oswald mojo's sidekick...a teenager w/a shaved skull...late in the story, there is an alastair p. heap of cambridge massachusetts...i assume the very same
*oswald mojo, mover & shaker
*werner lingham, in st. louis
*alexander jelly, venice west
richard pussy, las vegas...all movers & shakers i believe
*that negro girl in north beach
*girl on the tabletop at duke
*a musician acquaintance in nashville...of oswald's...makes mixture sixty-nine, some sort of potent pot
*a volkswagon bus full of zombis...oswald's players
*twelve blooming engineers w/brushcuts
*all-night people, las vegas
*the weary group at the blackjack board
*early cleanup men
*drunken movie star
*oklahoma oil-cowboy...all at las vegas
*harriet, the 1st strawberry blonde
*sylvia, the 2nd strawberry blonde, vegas for both
*drowsing waiter at the bar, same
*a hairy little man squatted on a silk pillow (party barn)
*twin vampires w/egyptian eye makeup, same
*couples dancing on the bare floor, same
*proust, the spider monkey, same
*"ravi shankar"...paps to one of the vamps
*an anonymous couple
*fat fred faun...mentioned earlier, too...one of the black elks
*spider washington...same
*southside, the hat check girl, (black elk or something)
*kristen mccleod...the girl w/the green socks...also "piglet" by paps, from chevy chase, her father in washington, an adviser to the president, too, called christmas cloud, she is a phi beta kappa
*a blonde deke in a white seersucker suit
*the elks and their women
*the driver leaned on his horn
*stoned locomotive...hairy man...musician
*(sophocles)...i dunno
*a lumpy apparition in a silk dressing gown...mojo i believe
*students hovered w/may flies
*a driver...bus...possibly marjorie daw
*a covey of coeds
*a teenaged salesgirl w/jean harlow hair
*the manager, an old bone of a man in wire glasses
*a friend w/mon (kristen's)
*the girl w/a forgotten name on the coast
*faceless figures in the backseats of cars
*parents dozing in adjacent rooms
*the coed who went into a nunnery
*the sign-in girl at circe iii, the girls' dorm
*summery coeds under sycamores
*president carbon (mentor university)
*a red-haired nurse in spike heels, nurse fang
*ian, prostrate surgeon, possibly canadian
*the architectural advisory committee
*crowds of curious students
*half a dozen zombi attendants
*a few people cheered
*two of proctor's slugs
*motorcycle campus police
*the terrified switchboard operator
*a team of attendants
*the weasel of a lab assistant
*two renegade officers from the woman's undergraduate judiciary brd
*one of the debutantes in a denim skirt
*the other, also in a denim skirt
*winnie the pooh characters...piglet...rastus? the old brown workhorse, "stood by himself"
*a police sergeant
*the figure in the painting...head cut off...by the figure
*kristen's father
*the president of the u.s.
*crowds of tourists
*a deputy sheriff
*the waiter, a blond weight-lifter type
*the incoming drivers
*a teenager w/a long grocery list
*(roman perez de ayala...poet)
*ankleless woman in pink straw hats
*off-duty busboys
*the men in dr. scholl's sandals
*a four-piece band
*passengers in paper hats
*a figure like a zeppelin
*the waddling couples
*the whispering tourists
*the violinist
*a waiter
*two cubans w/zapata mustaches
*a number of tourists
*men & boys who'd swum out to dive for american coins
*a maraca band in festooned shirtsleeves
*a taxi driver
*swarms of undersized children
*batista
*buddha...listed earlier, too...a 7' negro w/an opal in his forehead, "motherball" on the back of his robe
*helmeted soldiers
*a priest
*the silver dollar kids
*a girl in a red dress
*an emaciated chinese-cuban woman w/a mustache, mrs. louie motherball
*1st mrs. motherball, maude
*(vachel lindsey...general william booth...?)
*the cuban & the indian
*old fishermen, couples, cabana boys, batista army sergeants, bearded law students, superman, croupiers, every genus of lewd stateside pedestrian
*the squadron of gnomes
*a congo band
*a hostess on a plane
*the milling crowd
*a figure...madmen...7,000 people...reporters
*a galloping cluster of students
*hosts of anarchists everywhere, itching to blow things up etc
*g kenneth mccleod, kristen's old man
*eisenhower
*the sergeants two



a quote or two
be careful. you are what you eat.

the voice of the turtle is in the air? [paps is in love.]

floating in the water was the largest turd he had ever seen in his life.

and...paps quotes michaelangelo...dear to me is sleep...while evil and shame endure...he

we mistake induction for generation.

vicarious sampling is all that remains; the sour evening game of the academies.

you are in a position to alter their inability to think collectively....oeuf, in his private infirmary room, to paps

evil needn't be conjured to manifest. it often functions on its own...thus spoke blacknesse to paps

the idea is to make noise.

god, they say, is love. and some one's got to pass the word.

notes to myself on the narration...breadcrumbs, more or less
okay, remember like how like in Out of Sight from leonard, he has the girl have that imaginary conversation w/her old man?...and how in jones's From Here to Eternity milt had that conversation with himself?...

...and seems like there's others, but i'll have to go and search those out again...alas...(okay okay, i remembered, sheesh, in Look Homeward, Angel from wolfe, eugene has that other twist, the reading/imagination twist)...somewhat like here, in this one, there's this switcheroo, the fabled story within-the-story, paps and the girl w/the green socks, kristen by name...

close your eyes...see...could be he's only trying to get in her pants. cause, seems like, earlier in the story, was it gorzy who spoke about the wolf story? but like around page 150 give or take, paps tells her, close your eyes. here the narrative has that change-up, a slow-floater, paps, the tale-teller, about the wolf, pooh leading piglet through the hundred acre wood, and all like that. so yeah anyway...like before, but w/a twist.

book the second...begins w/chap 11 of 21

some words/slang of the time...
dig/for understand...man, imagine Bartleby, the Scrivener, america's 1st existential man calming saying...or, in this case, energetically exclaiming, i would prefer not to... man.

ummm...bread/money...fuzz/the police...baby/a guy speaking to the female of the species...let's split...cats...one groovy late in the story...pad for a place to lay one's head...gimme some skin

update, finished, 9 jan 13, wednesday afternoon, 3:29 p.m. e.s.t.

there's a lot of meat & potatoes to this story, a kind of chronicle of the times, interesting for what it does hold within the telling, the time of the telling (1958), and even more so, for when it was published...what was it? 1966?

the story records so much of what was still to come...the turbulent 60s had not yet reached their peak...the march on the pentagon, all that jazz. but the story is loaded w/details that show us what we're doing today even--a map w/red and blue flags and the various hues between. will we ever lose the maps? the flags and pennants?

too...a review or two spoke of misogyny, and at least one, hallelujah and amen, provided a reason for that critique--paps rape of pam that was not a rape, not the way the telling presented it. but too...the telling showed the female of the time...call it awakening to where things stood. paps, "his stomach still churned at the meaning of kristen's all-night absence from the dorm..."

much of that--there did not exist--or, there did not exist as it does today--co-ed dorms. the crusade to change that is a bit-player in this story, but it does illuminate for the uninitiated, perhaps, that free love thingy of the 60s that came to be, a kind of reaction, an unintended consequence to the prohibition of co-ed living.

so the girls had to be back in their rooms by such-and-such a time. there's a ref to some absurd form of chastity belt...or something. heh! and then there's jack, the girl w/the joan-of-arc haircut, whose hand caresses judy lumpers thigh, who eyes judy's...knockers...a word not used in the story (i don't recall exactly how often or in what manner they are described)..but she eyes them as the men do. and perhaps that is some sort of failing, or could be argued so, on farina's part. worried about size and all when the poor down-trodden lesbians just wanna have fun...or something.

but i'd hazard that if there is any misogyny in the telling, there is enough evidence of other things to argue the other point. i think the focus of those who point to misogyny in the text expose their own fashionable-ideology...win the kewpie doll and give me the word for hatred of men without having to google it.

it's like those who count the n-word in huck finn...neglecting the manner in which the po' white folk mistreat hogs. pennants. post them and rally around them. oh la.

there's so much to enjoy about this one...the energy...okay, sure, at times the telling is sophomoric--the turd floating in the toilet bowl--but these are college kids we're talking here. we expect them to act differently?

so yeah...there's some themes...motifs if you want...running through this one...the idea of exemption--bartleby, i would prefer not to...man. having the benefit of hindsight...in the end, that rallying cry about peace love and free drugs has resulted in what?

...a b-52 drop of toasters and ronco peelers? from wherever, man...we noticed it first from japan...now it's what, china?
7,000 ways to send a text message? fifty ways to leave your lover.

[Bücherangelegenheiten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nur zwei Tage nach Erscheinen seines Romans „Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me“ im Jahr 1966, hatte der Autor Richard Fariña einen Motorradunfall und verunglückte. Somit bleibt es sein erster und einziger Roman.

Die Hauptfigur Gnosis Pappadopoulis kehrt im Frühling 1958 zurück von diversen Reisen, um an der Universität sein Astronomiestudium wieder aufzunehmen.
Statt aber zu studieren, geistert Pappadopoulis lieber über den Campus, feiert Partys, nimmt Dorgen, verliebt sich und erzählt esoterische Geschichten. Er ist eine Art moderner Prometheus, einer der aufbegehrt, der Regeln sprengen möchte. Die Geschichte rund um Pappadopoulis ist eine Achterbahnfahrt, ein ständiges Auf und Ab.

Oberflächlich betrachtet ist „ Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me“ ein College-Roman, der sich mit der Hippie-Revolte, der sexuellen Revolution und der Studentenschaft befasst. Unter der Oberfläche befasst sich der Roman aber auch mit dem Tod, Atomwaffen, der kubanischen Revolution und dem Krieg. Die Hauptfigur bleibt im Roman so etwas wie ein Anti-Held, Pappadopoulis ist zum Teil großkotzig und ein Schwätzer, gleichzeitig ist er aber auch ein jugendlicher Suchender, ein ewig Zweifelnder und ein Sympathieträger.

Sprachlich ist der Roman durchzogen von Beatnik-Slang. Die Sprache ist schnell, voller Witz, gespickt mit Drogen und Sex. Oft ist es schwer einzuordnen auf welcher Bewusstseinsebene sich die Figur gerade befindet, aber gerade dadurch entsteht ein wahres Sprachwunderwerk. Das Buch ist voller Anspielungen zur Odyssee, Musik, Film und Religion. Auch wenn man diese nicht unbedingt erkennt, bietet der Roman dem offenen Leser, der sich auf die Geschwindigkeit und den Sprachwitz einlässt, ein grandioses Lesevergnügen.

Warum Fariñas Roman erst im Jahre 2018 auf Deutsch erschienenen ist bleibt ein Rätsel, denn es reiht sich problemlos in die Klassiker der Literatur, wie Homers „Odyssee“, Manns „Der Zauberberg" oder Grass’ „Die Blechtrommel“ ein. Unbedingt lesen, es lohnt sich.

Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
#Bücherangelegenheiten

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

After attending a book signing party for "Been Down So Long..." Richard Farina climbed onto a guest's motorcycle to attend his wife's birthday party, but he was killed in an accident before arriving. Though his wife had been upset with him at the signing because he had failed to get her a present, she returned home days after his death to find the apart they had shared filled with flowers he'd arranged to have delivered.
Much like these forgotten blooms, Farina's sole novel should be considered precious. Friends of Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan, a patron of the White Horse and protest folk singer, married to Joan Baez's sister, Farina was entrenched in 1960's New York bohemian and beat scene. It is this that lends a certain authenticity to his caricature as character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis.
Gnossos is a controversial, bombastic, drug-addled dreamer, hip to the point of modern myth amongst his peers and at the same time, utterly peerless. He becomes entangled with political protest groups, dope pushers, spacey neighbors, and one certain femme fatale, and Farina takes us along for the ride. The result is a comic trip and shimmering, secret, psychedelic gem. Not as well known as the work of Farina's counterparts, "Been Down So Long" waits patiently to be discovered, much like the blossoms he'd seemingly sent to Mimi from beyond the grave. It is by turns outrageous and brilliant, and Gnossos is as frustrating and awful as he is lovable, surrounded by a cast of mad geniuses and impassioned coeds.
While "Been Down So Long" is written in a very specific setting, the larger picture it creates is one of youth desperately searching for meaning in a possibly random world. Of course, it is not the only novel to explore this, but it deserves a place alongside the greatest of its ilk. It's hard to say what Farina might have added to his legacy had he not met his end so prematurely, but if "Been Down" is a true indicator of his talent, it makes his passing all the more tragic.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

A campus novel - a great voice, husband to Mimi (Joan Baez's little sis)and college pal of Pynchon. Great stuff - like a literary animal house, hip, clear-eyed, quick, maybe Kerouac's kid brother - both Ivy League btw.

[Patrick Wensink · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most fun books I've read in a long while. Part blueprint for Animal House/part homage to Farina's famous buddy, Thomas Pynchon. It's a shame this was his only book.

[Anna Schechter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow....this book is a trip.

Often I didn’t know where I was in time or space, what was happening, or why, and I liked that. Somehow the apolitical antihero, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, finds himself the poster child of college campus revolt. The college is a thinly veiled Cornell, and every corner is laced with opiates, theatrics, suicidal longing, and total immorality. Dense lists, paranoid rambling, and philosophical heresy fill the pages of this chaotic, whirlwind novel. Hilarious and twisted, the back of my copy (which my good friend lent to me) sings Fariña’s praise in bringing the 60’s to life with the same perfection as F. Scott Fitzgerald did the 20’s. High praise—which I believe he’s earned.

If you liked Catcher in the Rye, Jesus’ Son, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, you’ll like this novel. Gnossos is like Holden Caulfield, if Holden used opium and actually got laid.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not dig this book.

Richard Fariña’s music with Mimi is some of the best of 60’s folk. He hung around with Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan, two all-time huge talents. Pynchon dedicated Gravity’s Rainbow to Fariña and wrote the introduction for the 1983 reissue of this book. I was fully on board the Fariña train after reading David Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street. The mythology surrounding the man is immense. Not to mention that I’m very friendly to hippie/psychedelic culture. I say this just to make the point that I thought I was the ideal reader for Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

That turned out not to be the case. What I did like was the general patchouli-scented atmosphere, the drugs, the music, the jive talking, slang, etc. There are a few beautiful turns of language from Fariña the narrator (“pupils adrift in a sea of mulberry blood vessels”) and I especially enjoyed when he went into “listing off a lot of similar things” mode, particularly on the descriptions of food. Kind of reminded me of Henry Miller. I admire the writing on the level of craft and skill with language.

Unfortunately, Fariña used his considerable talent with words to paint a pretty repulsive picture. I did not find Gnossos Pappadopoulis to be an endearing or sympathetic character in the least… and he’s there for every scene of the book. Like others have noted, there is a wide streak of chauvinism running through the book. The female characters in the book are there for Gnossis to have sex with, or they have big boobs/bouncing ass, or they’re repressive narc-types. It’s very Hugh Hefner. There is a lot about the main character’s “periscope.” Fariña even has a twelve-year old girl see Gnossos’s boner (why???). The cringe-y sex scenes have not aged well and will likely ruffle modern feathers. As Pynchon notes in the intro, Pappadopolis is abusive. I understand this is college, they’re horny, it was a different time, sure… but the main character (who is ostensibly a stand-in for Fariña) felt scummy. And it seems like the point of the book is that he’s a really groovy cat. Or am I missing something?

To tell the truth, I did find the book pretty riveting and read it fairly quickly over the last week. But maybe I was just excited for it to end. Going in, I was expecting something funnier or more joyful? Turns out it was kind of a bad trip. Who knew the “Pack Up Your Sorrows” guy could get so negative? I’m still a fan of the music though. And, Thomas Pynchon, if you’re reading this, I appreciate your recommendation and wish I had enjoyed the book more. Also, Kate, if you’re reading this, thank you for gifting me this book and sorry for writing this review.

**Spoiler**
So that I remember why I found this book's ending so disturbing - Gnossos cuts the tip off of his condom before having sex with his new girlfriend (of course she was a virgin when they met) Kristin McCleod so he can get her pregnant without telling her. On a whim he then leaves for Cuba and calls her dad (whom he has never met or spoken to) to say he “probably knocked up his daughter.” While in Cuba he realizes he inadvertently got “the clap” from Kristin during the condom-tip-cut-off episode, presumably because she had been with the hospitalized professor Oeuf behind Gnossos’s back. So what does he do in retaliation? Takes her to an abandoned Dairy Queen parking lot where he bounds-and-gags her and forcibly gives her a suppository of heroin, then leaves her there. In the next chapter, he reads in a newspaper that she’s getting married to Oeuf, who is the new dean of the college, and who has arranged for Gnossos to be drafted into the army. Then it just ends. What the hell????

[max k · Rating 5 out of 5]

There hasn't been a book I've read this year which I've been particularly taken with. I've read mostly *good* literature but nothing phenomenal. So, why not re-read an old favorite I've been meaning to tackle again for the three years since I read.

Calling this a "forgotten classic" is reductive, however, it truly deserves more of a readership. This is the reason why I've salvaged extra copies to give to people such as my writing tutor Steve Hollyman, my girlfriend, and various YouTubers I watch.

Fariña writes like nobody else. Sure, you can feel various influences here. He was a Nabokov fan and was taught by him, and you can definitely read a Kerouac/Beat influence, though with so much better sentence construction. Its free-flowing poetic prose is way easier to follow than On The Road, and the book is much, much funnier than many of its counterparts. His college friend Thomas Pynchon must have either been an influence or somebody whose friendship came out of a similar style. Heck, even the names are very Pynchon-esque, and the book feels like a portmanteau of 'V' with the aforementioned Beat works.

Maybe Fariña's problem was the time of publication. Too young to be a Beat, too old to be a hippie, Fariña's book simply came between two zeitgeists. It's arguably postmodernist, but with one foot firmly in an 'old school' style of writer. It's so, so damn funny, with several moments making me laugh aloud. Yet it also has a creeping apocalyptic tone, namely in the form of the monkey following Gnossos around. There's also the whole final act of the novel, which pivots to something darker. Anybody whose takeaway from the novel is the characters go unpunished for their behaviour they clearly did not read the whole thing.

Hilarious and intellectual all in one, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me stands even better on a reread. Read this book!

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have none of the romanticized nostalgia for the ‘60s and am thankful to find no such idealization in this novel. I can see why some folks wouldn’t like it: “coolness” and literature are uneasy bedfellows. Plenty of readers choose the introspective path early on precisely because the cool kids are always being such assholes. But Farina is not simply singing a hymn to every magic moment of selfless abandon and shitfaced partying (aka “being cool”). As TRP observes in the Intro, “Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window.” What’s menaced is something in all of us, if not our literal selves. Farina dubs it Exemption and Immunity. There are other names, some flattering, some condescending: youth, hope, idealism, transcendence, nirvana, love, omniscience, and so on. The prose is decidedly not delirious but the tight flow of a high and alert IQ out for a romp. The novel is a species of the disenchanting Bildungsroman, yet there is no surrender even when the Spirit knows it has been conquered. It is not the univocally upbeat monologue of a drug-addled egotist; other characters voice concerns that can’t be ignored, try as Gnossos might. Here’s Pynchon again: “In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he’s left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool.” What is anybody going to do with the road ahead when they just want to read, fuck, and think? Farina—nobody’s fool—saw that road pretty clearly, took the turn too sharp, lived fast, died young, but thankfully left us this flawed gem as a kaleidoscopic perspective on coming of age when there’s no place for you in the future.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zippo Bang! Wayward university student Gnossos Pappadopoulis returns to school after an absence that is the subject of many rumors, steals figures from the campus nativity scene, smokes great quantities of marijuana, trips on mescaline, falls in love, incites a campus riot and goes to the Cuban Revolution.

I enjoyed this book so much that I will read it more than once-possibly even annually. My first exposure to this book was in the summer of 1975 when I found it in my big brother's book case. He had a paperback edition from the late 1960s. It had a naked lady on the cover, so, naturally, 12 year old Neil had to skim it in search of sex scenes. Fortunately, the first occurs in the second chapter. Only now I know that "Night in Tunisia" is a jazz composition, not an orgasmic utterance. Richard Farina was familiar to me even then because my big brother had all of his record albums and I had heard his dulcimer cacophony over and over again as a youngster. Recently, my manager, a staid sixty-plus-years-old tax attorney, saw the book on my desk and was very excited. Much to my surprise, he had read it a long time ago. He sang its praises as a great book for charades. According to him, no one can ever guess the title.

Sadly, Richard Farina died shortly after it was published, so we'll never enjoy any more of his storytelling.