Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
“And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” is a fictionalized account of a notorious and then-famous murder among a small group of people of the Bohemian-cum-Beat Generation, spiritual heirs of the so-called Lost Generation of a few decades earlier. Later, many of them would become famous, the rest famous by association, but at the time they were nothing but a group of assorted nuts and fruits, idling away their days by drinking every sort of alcoholic drink known to man, writing mooncalf poetr...
DNF at 37%This is so incredibly slow moving and dull, I just can't bring myself to read any more. I don't care about any of the characters, the writing is uninspiring and nothing has happened so far apart from a load of dudes getting drunk and talking about shipping out.
Kerouac and Burroughs wrote this novel together, writing alternate chapters, in 1945 when they were unknowns. They never were able to get it published, being unknown, and the publishers thinking it would have no sales appeal. Welcome to the book biz. It was finally published in 2008.Both writers used simple sentences, Kerouac not going off on his poetic riffs. I couldn't tell who was writing unless I read the chapter heading. Like all of Kerouac's and Burroughs' writing, this story was based upo...
Though definitely an invaluable literary artifact and of interest to Beat junkies, this is little more than that. Good literature? No, not even approaching the skill and depth of the authors' later works. Interesting, though, and a good story--how could it not be, based on facts? Just severely lacking on the technical side. There's a reason this wasn't published, there's a reason this wasn't the book that made either Kerouac or Burroughs famous, and honestly? It's better that way.Still, a must-r...
Read this in a day! It's a quick read. Sure learned a lot about being a merchant marine. Also sad and interesting was seeing the corruption of the cops while Will was bar tending. Right after this I watched Kill Your Darlings. (Note: Ginsburg is nowhere in this book.)I can't give an objective review of this book right now. I somehow got so immersed in this Beat culture all I can say is "This is great!" when maybe it's not. Great glimpses of New York in the forties, especially having to dress nic...
The introduction to this book mentions that "Hippos" existed for years in manuscript form, buried under floor boards. Could be apocryphal, as most "lost art" stories are. Dear estates of the late Messrs Kerouac and Burroughs: should've left this manuscript under the floorboards. Or maybe ran it past an editor?My big problem with "Hippos" was that I couldn't feel sympathy for any of the characters. They had "no form or beauty that we should desire them." The protagonists spend the entirety of the...
And the Hippos . . . is quite the hidden gem. A collaboration between Kerouac & Burroughs written in 1945 long before either of them achieved any literary success. The glimmers of future greatness are there, but perhaps more refreshingly the self-indulgences both writers are occasionally known for are absent. The Burroughs chapters have all of his trademark wry, black humor, and the Kerouac chapters lack some of his poetry but retain his pathos.The afterward detailing the history of this novel a...
I don't know where to start with this review. This book meant so much to me. Yet, I know for many people it wouldn't be a good read. It's the only novel Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs ever wrote together, and it sat under floorboards for decades before finally getting published only a few years ago, now that all of the people it's about have died. Lucien Carr was the last, passing away in 2005. He had asked the person who published this not to do it while he was alive.This book, while not...
The Beat-lunatic's dream book. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac's first book - and not only that but the only book that they wrote together. Written in 1945, the story is based on their friend Lucian Carr who murdered another friend of everyone's at that time.Burroughs would write one chapter and Kerouac would write the other. If one just read the chapters or book you would notice the style of the writing right away. In other words it is very Burroughs and very Kerouac. Even as young writer...
Two brilliant writers, one of them I still consider a favourite (10 years after picking up On the Road and losing my mind), write alternating chapters about a murder in New York around 1944, and you expect me to give it less than 3 stars? Well, I've thought about it a lot and I think it's only fair that it gets no more than that, despite Kerouac's marvelous storytelling (Burroughs was ever so clever as well.) The big story behind the book, which was based on real events, took a long time to come...
There are great things in this book beyond the novel itself.
The best part about this early beat novel is contrasting the temperaments of the two narrators: Kerouac comes off as a naive little boy catching fireflies, while Burroughs is a grumpy old junkie codger squashing the fireflies and grumbling to himself about how stupid they were for flying near him.
I assume any reader who has been through one or two books by either William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac (or both) has a more than occasional appetite for fiction that is beyond, or at least different from, conventional escapist entertainment.So it’s slightly ironic to learn from the detailed afterword in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written by Burroughs' bibliographer and literary executor James Grauerholz, that this mildly legendary yet long unpublished chapter-trading collaboration...
Burroughs AND Keroauc writing a book together? What more could you want?This book is BRILLIANT! Loved it. As it was written at a very early stage in their careers, I must admit that initially I had doubts - which were soon dispelled by the great quality of writing from both of these legendary writers. It almost beggars belief that they were just in the incipient stages of their soon-to-be-great literary careers, when they wrote this fascinating story which affected them all in a deep way.Kerouac...
“I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.”And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is a fictionalized account of David Kammerer’s murder by Lucien Carr in 1943, cowritten by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. The crime shocked the public opinion, partly because Carr was a gifted Columbia student and partly due to his claim that h...
As the first novel by both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, in collaboration, this is a book of great literary significance, especially to anybody with an interest in the Beat Movement.The two writers wrote a chapter each, alternately, and read their chapters aloud to each other before the other started work on the next one. Anybody familiar with either writer's work would easily be able to tell which chapters were written by which writer, even if they weren't told from the point of view o...
This book was above all else an interesting bit of literary history. It was written in the mid 1940s, almost a full ten years before Kerouac and Burroughs became famous. It is written from the perspective of two characters, Dennison and Ryko, written by Burroughs and Kerouac respectively. It is fascinating to read their early work, and to see their styles play off one another. It is a fictionalized version of their experiences with the Kammerer murder by Lucien Carr, and they do it justice. In t...
The strange case of Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. Murder, almost without consequence, unlike The Stranger, and Hippos makes for a pretty good companion piece - what with the matter-of-fact nearly emotionless aspects of the material, and how the social mores impact the punishment. Hippos was written (in 1945) about the same time as The Stranger, and before Camus' English translation. Hippos is a real case, though. And it's less about the murder and aftermath, and more about setting the scene, o...
Well, you can't say /nothing/ happens, I mean, they eat glass within the first 10 pages and there's, of course, murder.
I think this book is fascinating. In case you don't know Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg were young and living in New York in the mid 40s about a decade before any of them would become famous and two men in their social circle were Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. This book is a barely fictionalized account of the events leading up to and the murder of Kammerer by Carr. Everyone's names are different but it's no mystery who anyone is supposed to be. This book states the rea...