Even in describing a cat in Mexico City, Kerouac notes that he doesn't scratch like an American cat. He draws comparions to convey his point often enough. And like many of the people in the neighborhoods where he spends most of his time, he is in awe of her ability to be happy and carefree despite being impoverished or marginalized. She is both beautiful and seductive to Kerouac, but equally self-destructive and out of reach. Tristessa (Esperanza Villanueva) is at the heart of the book, however. There is certainly an undertow of sadness in Kerouac's voice as he struggles to understand layers and layers of contrasts. Tristessa is a sliver of a novella that best captures Kerouac's voice. And this time around, on another trip to Mexico City after On The Road, he slushes it up into metaphor. And yet, it can be quite dazzling when he gets a line right or a thought right. In typical Kerouac fashion, the tone is raw and rambling, scratched out with more creation than craft. It's everything you might expect from someone trying to live on the edge, while winding one arm around a safety rope so he might live to write about it. The stories he spins are sometimes all a daze and hallucination, stabbing around the subject but letting it slip from his grasp at the same time.
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