"No author in recent years has caused the same stormy controversy as William Burroughs, the Beat writer and former drug-addict who crased into literary prominence some years ago when his 'definitive hip book' The Naked Lunch was first published.
"Is he, as Norman Mailer asserts, 'the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius' or is his devastating and savage satire of present-day life akin, as Edith Sitwell says, to having 'one's nose nailed to other people's lavatories'.
"In Dead Fingers Talk , a new novel constructed out of his earlier writings, Burroughs, who was hooked for over fifteen years, writes not only of the tortured world of the addict but also combines fantasy with a complex style to portray the contemporary world in a satirical light.
"Coming from an American big-business family, Burroughs reserves his sharpest shafts for American Culture and American Advertising.
"Although his critics are sharply divided, those who acclaim him include Mary McCarthy and Anthony Burgess, who stress his enormous and original talent to write in a new and compelling way. Those critics who cannot stomach Burroughs' powerful narrative, nor the manner in which he writes of drug addiction and its effects, still admit his major status and his originality". [jacket blurb, Tandem pbk, UK, 1970]
"When Dead Fingers Talk , an amalgam of The Naked Lunch , The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket that Exploded (1962), was first published in 1963, it received such a long hostile review in the Times Literary Supplement that a 14-week correspondence followed, with hundreds of letters agreeing or disagreeing with the review. The correspondence ran to four pages in some issues, and was reputed to have significantly increased the circulation." --John Calder (in The Independent , Monday 4 August 1997).
Recommended.
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