Cain's Book

Price: 22.95 AUD

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This is the journal of Joe Necchi a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe's world is the half-world of drugs and addicts -- the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi however is a tool freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain the malcontent the profligate the rebel who lives by no one's rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him Trocchi's muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors in his roman a clef Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of heroin of the fix is central to Cain's Book both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology. Cain’s Book is the classic late-1950s account of heroin addiction. . . . An un-self-forgiving existentialism rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity set this novel apart from all others of the genre. –– William S. Burroughs